Every small business has a story to tell, and the Hartford Business Journal’s Local Insight column will share those stories about what works, what doesn’t, and how small businesses manage to stay in the game.
This week, Local Insight focuses on the challenges faced by a 98-year-old business, and how it met challenges that doomed others to failure and closure.
Seizing upon its primary assets — a unique ice-producing operation and its pure well water — The Great Burnside Ice Co. in East Hartford has stayed in the game through diversification. Its most-recent expansion created The Olde Burnside Brewing Co., which is on track to grow by 40 percent in the coming year.
About 10 years ago, when Robert McClellan, a third-generation family member to run the business, the company was not experiencing much growth.
However, customers were purchasing water from a well his father had drilled in front of the ice plant in 1964; the purpose of the well was to provide pure water for Burnside’s ice production.
McClellan discovered that the customers were using the water to brew their own beer. So he had the well water tested, and discovered it had the same composition of Burton upon Trent water in England, an area associated for centuries with England’s ales.
He then hired a brew master, purchased brewery equipment, and began experimenting with different brews. It took nearly two years of refining the beer before launching it in October 2000, he said.
The McClellan’s brewery, The Olde Burnside Brewing Co., had the advantage of integrating aspects of its ice-producing business, which is located in the same building on Tolland Street.
By utilizing its technology used to freeze ice, the beer could be cooled down quickly after brewing, allowing Burnside Brewing to avoid the traditional filtering and pasteurizing process used by many domestic beer producers, McClellan explained.
And that, he said, is the key to making fine-tasting ale in the Scottish tradition. “It’s good beer and nobody is making beer like we make,” he said.
His next challenge was to find a distributor. Again, Burnside relied on its existing ice distribution operation that helped him introduce the beers to retailers, bars and restaurants throughout New England. So McClellan piggy-backed the distribution of its beers — Ten Penny Ale, Dirty Penny Ale, and Penny Weiz — with the distribution of its ice.
Now, sales of the beer in new markets — such as in Vermont — are “out of control,” he said.
Diversification has moved the McClellan clan — Robert runs the business with his two sons Justin, 39, and Case, 26 — into a growth enterprise.
But diversification isn’t new to the McClellan family. The Great Burnside Ice Co. was founded in East Hartford in 1911 by Albert McClellan, who made regular door-to-door deliveries of ice blocks in a horse-drawn wagon.
Business was good during the early 1900s, when ice blocks were needed for iceboxes. But new refrigeration technology replaced the need for iceboxes, beginning in the 1930s, dooming most ice producers. During the industry’s height, there were 80 in the northeast, McClellan said. Today, there are just three in the northeast and only one in Connecticut, he said.
But the Great Burnside Ice Co. met the challenge of sinking demand by diversifying. Over time, the company sold rock salt and home heating oil and coal.
In the 1960s, the demand for ice spiked back up, so the McClellans rebuilt their 1933 ice-producing machine and it got back into ice production full time.
Now it sells ice and beer, which is sold at package stores in gallon jugs or in kegs, and can be purchased on draft at numerous bars. It can also be purchased at the annual Pipes In The Valley, a Celtic festival, co-sponsored by Burnside Brewing with Riverfront Recapture, on Sept. 26.
Diane Weaver Dunne is the Hartford Business Journal managing editor.
