Frozen gems Sales of ice beginning to heat up for Getchell Brothers of Brewer

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There’s a warm, comforting feeling that comes from ice on a hot summer day. The familiar chime-like sound as the cubes clink against the side of a glass or the tremendous swooshing noise that resonates when a can or bottle is pulled from a cooler’s arctic bath tickles the eardrums and alerts the senses that relief is forthcoming.

It’s a pleasure Will Farnham savors every day as both a connoisseur and a manufacturer of the frozen gems. The newly inducted member of the International Packaged Ice Association’s Hall of Fame espouses the virtues of manufactured ice over homemade, saying there’s more to ice than freezing water.

The chairman of Getchell Brothers in Brewer, which has been selling ice for 114 years, promotes his product the way a diamond dealer sells his stones, with such a penchant for detail that anyone who listens to his pitch wouldn’t want to part with the precious ice cubes, either.

A finer piece of ice, although sold in bags, has the clarity and strength of an exceptional diamond, so clear of flaws that it doesn’t crack when enveloped by a warm drink. The cube is able to cool a beverage as it melts slowly from the outside without diluting the flavor of the drink.

On its own, whether sucked on like candy or munched like popcorn, good-quality bagged ice releases a crisp, exquisite sensation that is nothing short of aaahhhhhh.

Homemade ice, however, is porous, clouded by minute air pockets that drink up liquid as it is poured into a glass. Cracks form, and the cubes melt quickly from the inside, causing the beverage to become diluted at a faster rate, according to Farnham.

“What surprises me is people will go out and pay a lot of money for a bottle of good scotch – it doesn’t matter if it’s Coke or scotch or Pepsi – and go home and put bad ice in it,” Farnham said.

So what’s the key to making better ice at home, like the kind sold in the bags?

“That’s our secret,” Farnham gloated.

While Farnham strives to instill in customers an appreciation for the unique characteristics of fine ice, at the same time he has to remind himself to be practical. After all, it is only ice, a dissolvable tool whose only true value is simply the relief it brings.

“If you’re having a party with 50 people, you’ll need 50 pounds of ice,” said Farnham, noting that the rule is one pound per person. “I always laugh at [the rule]. That is what they say, but you could always have someone who drinks too much.”

Because of the popularity of bottled water and the arrival of the summer heat, Getchell Brothers is selling about 250 tons’ worth of ice daily this July. And even with that quantity going out the door on 25 standard-size delivery trucks or tractor-trailers, it has been hard for the company to keep up with demand this week.

On the sweltering Fourth of July, numerous merchants, even after receiving two deliveries of ice, had to put up signs that read “temporarily out of ice.”

Restaurants, although equipped with their own icemakers, added to the shortage because the high temperatures caused their machines to overheat.

“They were going to [our coolers at local stores] and buying 50 to 60 bags at a whack,” Farnham said. “It was the busiest Fourth of July ever for us.”

The ice-making business in Maine is seasonal, just like blueberries, strawberries and potatoes, Farnham said, and most of Getchell Brothers’ annual sales of $5.5 million are generated in the summer. Besides ice, the company is a distributor of Gifford’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers ice cream.

“We’ll sell more ice in one hour [in July] than we do the whole month of January,” Farnham said.

Though he pointed out the old saying “you can’t sell ice to an Eskimo in the winter,” Farnham explained there was a time before refrigeration that Getchell Brothers also sold quite a lot of ice in the wintertime.

The Penobscot and the Kennebec rivers were the premiere sites in the state to collect ice in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Unlike other rivers, these two flowed north-to-south and an east-west wind would blow the snow off the rivers’ surfaces. Blocks of ice could be cut off the surface more easily because workers didn’t have to contend with piled-up snow.

Getchell Brothers’ staff of more than 150 workers would chip the ice and sell it to area homes and businesses or ship it around the world. The company supplied customers with signs to put in their windows to alert drivers as to how much ice they needed. On each of three sides on the signs, in bold black letters, were numbers – 33 1/3 lbs., 50 lbs. or 100 lbs. – and depending on the quantity that was needed, that side of the sign was placed top up in the window.

Back then, Getchell’s competed against 80 other companies operating in the Bangor-Brewer area.

“If refrigeration hadn’t been invented, we’d be the Saudi Arabia of the ice world,” quipped Farnham.

Now the company has only one Maine competitor, and Getchell Brothers’ familiar white ice coolers are at stores from Fort Kent to northern Massachusetts, and from coastal Maine into New Hampshire.

Farnham started with the company in 1963, and in 1971 became general manager. In 1980, he purchased the business from the Getchell family. Most recently, in 1999, Farnham expanded the business, building a $3 million manufacturing and distribution site in Sanford.

During the hot spell on Wednesday, Farnham stood on the loading dock in Brewer looking across the river toward Bangor’s waterfront, where the National Folk Festival will be held this August. The river’s surface appeared bluer than the bags Farnham packages his ice in.

“I don’t even have time to appreciate it,” Farnham said of his river view as he stood on the dock for a few seconds to admire it.

Then, pointing a finger to his left, Farnham said if he were an old-fashioned, street-corner peddler, he’d be able to fetch close to $5 a bag from motorists if he stood at the intersection of Main and Wilson streets in Brewer on this sweltering day.

The first place the roadside customers would put the ice?

“On their forehead,” he replied, putting the back of his hand above his brow mimicking the common sign for, “Oh, my aching head.”

Farnham has a job others would envy on a hot summer day. He is able to seek relief from the heat in Getchell Brothers’ 25-degree freezer, where pallets of ice are stacked for a short time before they’re shipped out.

In a room next to the freezer, a crew of men, some in flannel shirts and others in shorts, stand in 54-degree air and watch as machines bag ice five pounds at a time. They stack the ice on pallets and move them with a forklift into the freezer. The bagging process is so quick there isn’t any time for melting to take place.

Twenty-five degrees is optimal for storing ice, according to Farnham. That’s why ice is stored in a separate freezer at stores, he said. It would melt if it were with milk, which is kept at 40 degrees, or would crack if it were with ice cream, which is best kept at “minus zero,” he said.

Getchell Brothers’ ice is made from Brewer water that is filtered, frozen and moved into a 15-foot-tall tank that is just as wide and more than 30 feet in length. This time of year, the machine is operating 24 hours a day.

“This is our busiest time,” Farnham said.

During the manufacturing process, the air that makes homemade ice porous is taken out of the ice made by Getchell Brothers. Farnham would not reveal how that’s done, saying it was a trade secret.

At the bottom of the tank, a spiral chipper cuts the ice into pieces and carries it onto conveyor belts, where it is poured into bags, then sealed and stacked. Getchell’s also sells blocks of ice, which Farnham said are more convenient for campsites because they melt even more slowly than chipped ice.

“Our ice is never touched by human hands,” said Farnham as he summed up the automated manufacturing process. That is, until the $1.25 5-pound bag is grabbed from the store’s freezer on a hot summer day and is ripped open so forcefully and hurriedly that in some instances the ice cubes fall out onto the ground.

“When you get weather like this, people go crazy,” Farnham said of the demand for ice. “We’re going crazy. It’s nuts.”