Hey, Leona.

People always ask us how we come up with beer names. Most often, the name of a beer we’re running through R+D doesn’t have a predetermined name. It’s a serial number until it is perfected, and then we refer to our bank of names (a spreadsheet full of historical references). In the case of Leona, our new pink lemonade Berliner Weisse, the name has been waiting for a beer worthy of the name.

Leona is named after physicist Leona Woods Marshall Libby. At 23 years old, Leona was the youngest and only female member of the team that built the first nuclear reactor and atomic bomb. She worked in secrecy in an abandoned football stadium at the University of Chicago. Back then, they called the reactor Chicago Pile 1, or the “Pile.” Leona’s specific contribution was the creation of a boron trifluoride counter to detect neutron activity, and she took measurements during the experiment.

Like most scientists working on the project, she had a casual attitude when it came to radiation. Her doctors warned her of fertility problems. But she and her first husband, John Marshall, who also worked on the project, found themselves with a child on the way. She didn’t want to end her work, so she hid the pregnancy with baggy clothes. She later gave birth to her first son, Peter, and returned to work a few days later. That is some serious dedication!

Leona went on to have a very successful post-war career that included holding fellowships at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Nuclear Studies, Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. She became a professor at New York University in 1962. Leona eventually became a professor at the University of Chicago and a staff member at Rand Corporation. Her final academic position was at UCLA, where she became interested in ecological and environmental issues, and she researched climate change and food irradiation.

In other words, she was a pretty important woman in both the Manhattan Project and science. There is so much more of her story to learn, so grab your own Leona and then find a corner in the taproom to give her a google (or DuckDuckGo) search. Cheers!