For 150 years the Berkey Creamery has been perhaps the sweetest part of the Penn State campus, elevating the simple experience of eating ice cream to near-legendary status.
Susan Watson, a staff supervisor at the creamery, has been there for the last 27 of those 150 years and has enjoyed every single one of them.
“We’ll see a student for four years, and then someday we’ll see their children, and then their children,” Watson says. “It’s a wonderful tradition.”
To celebrate a century and a half of this tradition, the creamery recently unveiled a special birthday cake ice cream flavor – which may have contributed to the record-breaking ice cream sales over Arts Fest weekend.
But the creamery is no stranger to big numbers. Freezer operator Terry Grove says an average weekend may require as many as 1,5000 tubs of ice cream – which works out to a whopping 4,500 gallons of sweet deliciousness.
Berkey Creamery manager Thomas Palchak has been running the ship for 29 years, and it doesn’t seem like he has any intention of slowing down. Perhaps it’s a demanding position, but his passion for his craft is clear as he looks at the production line inside the food science building.
“This is where the magic happens,” Palchak says.
When you first walk into the creamery, filled with bustling employees and whirring assembly lines, you’ll see a foamy white substance in a puddle in front of the door. But it’s no accident — this is an antibacterial product to help keep the creamery safe and clean.
The process of making the famous ice cream starts with 5,000 gallons of milk, which comes in on tanker trucks. Over the course of a year, the trucks bring in roughly 4.5 million pounds of milk, or about 53,000 gallons.
From there the milk is tested for quality and safety before being rapidly heated and cooled as part of the pasteurization process. The milk will then be used not just for ice cream, but for all kinds of dairy products including cheeses, sherbet and yogurt.
After being pasteurized, the milk is transformed into two creams that serve as the basis for all of the creamery’s ice cream flavors: a chocolate cream, and a white cream for vanilla and most other flavors.
From there, almost anything you can think of might get thrown into the mix: cane sugar, syrups, chunks of fruit, pie pieces, nuts, caramel, pretzels and much more all get used for different flavors.
Once it makes its way into a tub (and through an x-ray machine to check for foreign contaminates), all of the ice cream has to go through three separate freezers.
The first freezer is chilled to an intense 35 degrees below zero, which essentially flash freezes the semisoft ice cream fresh off the assembly line into a frozen block. When you walk inside, it’s so cold that your shoes stick lightly to floor as any moisture on your soles instantly freezes.
If you look up inside this high-ceiling freezer, you will see white flakes floating down as it literally snows inside.
“The fans in here are so intense that you actually have to turn them down if you want to be able to talk,” Palchak says. “The winds are so fast it can actually be painful.”
But Palchak says any employee is only allowed inside the deep freezer for no more than 15 minutes, and only while wearing heavy thermal coats.
From there, the ice cream is moved into what Palchak calls the “balmy” negative 25 degree freezer before being warmed up to a scoopable consistency at five degrees, where its stored until being shipped off or moved to the store room.
“We make about 8,000 gallons of ice cream a week, and we still can’t keep this thing full,” Palchak says – but he’s not complaining, and neither is anyone else.
“I really love this place,” Watson says.
