Made in Worcester

WORCESTER - More than 12,000 Dark 'n' Stormys were quaffed in the Goslings Island Bar in the America’s Cup Village when the yacht-racing world converged on Bermuda last month for the 2017 America’s Cup competition.

And every can of Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer - official ginger beer of the 35th America’s Cup - that was mixed with Goslings Black Seal Rum, crushed ice and a slice of lime to make what is called Bermuda’s national cocktail bore this label: “Canned Under Authority of Polar Beverages, Worcester MA.”

Under a partnership between Worcester soft-drink bottler Polar and Bermuda’s premier rum maker, Gosling Bros., a key component of the Dark 'n' Stormy - a cocktail name trademarked by Gosling Bros. and evocative of Bermudan surf and sail - is made here in this blue-collar New England city nearly 800 miles from the British resort island in the Atlantic.

Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer is a thing. “Goslings is the No. 1-selling ginger beer in the U.S.,” said Goslings spokesman Glenn Kelley. “We’re projecting to hit 2 million cases of the Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer by the end of this year.”

Traditionally made with ginger root, sugar and a fermenting yeast that leaves a distinctive cloudiness, nonalcoholic ginger beer features more of a ginger kick than its soft-drink descendant, ginger ale, and has become increasingly popular in this country both as a mixer and a standalone drink.

The Goslings variety is described as “the hippest” ginger beer by food bloggers Taylor Hackbarth and Lindsay Landis at Love & Olive Oil. “It’s the brand that all of hip local eateries seem to stock.” Reviewer Matt Bergstrom at the Delicious Sparking Temperance Drinks blog writes: “Ooh, this is tasty! It’s got a little pepper to sizzle on the tongue but not so much to burn your throat ... A refreshing beverage: stimulates the brain and warms the gullet.”

Stock research site Zacks.com reports sales of Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer this past fiscal year increased more than 23 percent, backed by strong sales in the U.S. and international markets. In March, Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer was added to the mixer section in some 4,500 Walmart stores in the United States. By May, the ginger beer and its diet variety had moved to numbers one and two in Walmart’s mixer sales, according to Gosling Bros.

Ginger beer is the latest success for Polar. America’s largest independent soft-drink bottler has embraced changing tastes and has made a splash with its zero-calorie flavored seltzers, now commanding 48 percent of the seltzer market in the Northeast.

Seltzer, a 30-million-case-a-year operation and growing, now represents the largest part of Polar’s business, says President and Chief Executive Officer Ralph D. Crowley Jr., a member of the fourth generation of the Crowley family to operate the company since its founding in 1882. He said Polar, with 1,700 employees, expects to exceed half a billion dollars in revenues this year.

Its classic Polar Dry orangeade, for decades a staple of the Central Massachusetts corner spa, now has spiffy new cans, website and Facebook page. “Orangina for working-class people,” Worcester native Chip O’Connor, bartender at Nick’s Bar and Restaurant on Millbury Street, calls it.

As the local bottling company with the polar bear on its roof has been transformed, so has the manufacturing landscape of the surrounding region.

Worcester traditionally has been a city that made things. Hoop skirts, corsets, telegraph wire, barbed wire, dining cars, envelopes, valentines, lunch pails, ammunition shells: all were made in the 19th- to mid-20th century in Worcester, where the monkey wrench and the steam calliope were invented, as was Robert Goddard’s prototype rocket.

The city “made a little bit of everything,” says Vanessa Bumpus, exhibitions coordinator at the Worcester Historical Museum, where a permanent installation, “In Their Shirtsleeves,” recalls the city’s industrial history. Worcester’s iconic three-deckers, built as inexpensive housing for laborers and their families, serve as reminders of an era of rapid expansion as immigrants poured into the city to work in the factories.

Over the course of the 20th century, Worcester experienced the fate of other midsized industrial cities in New England, as manufacturing declined, and mill and factory jobs left for the South or overseas.

“The broad shoulders of manufacturing carried the city and the region for a hundred years,” says Timothy P. Murray, president and CEO of the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and a former mayor of the city and former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.

“We’ve seen over the last 20, 30, 40 years that that changed,” he said. “Technology and global forces have impacted manufacturing. But it’s still one of the largest sectors we have.” Advanced manufacturing has stayed strong, in biotechnology and the life sciences.

“Worcester, because of its history and its roots, will always have a strong manufacturing mindset,” Mr. Murray said. “The blue-collar ethos permeates all. It’s an important part of our identity and the unique nature of the region.”

Things - some of them quite remarkable - continue to be made in Worcester and the surrounding region.

IPG Photonics Corp. of Oxford, one of the region’s largest manufacturers, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and 4,230 employees worldwide, is a world leader in fiber lasers that convert energy into intense beams of light used in industry to cut, weld or mark metals.

Abrasives made by Norton/Saint-Gobain of Worcester include sanders used by the US Olympic luge team to sharpen the blades of their sleds. Advertising banners for the sides of buses, screen protectors for cellphones and resealable packaging labels that keep snacks fresh are among the films and adhesives made by FLEXcon of Spencer.

Headsets worn by aviators are made by Worcester’s David Clark Co., which also made the pressurized space suits used by Gemini astronauts. The St. Pierre Manufacturing Corp. in Worcester still makes horseshoes that were President George H. W. Bush’s favorites for pitching at Kennebunkport.

I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris is supported by a joint system designed by Kinefac Corp., a Worcester metal-forming-technology firm that also makes dental drills, airplane fasteners and tie rods for nuclear power plants.

Table Talk Pies, which bakes 2 million 4-inch snack pies and 400,000 regular-sized pies per week, broke ground last year on a new plant in South Worcester that will crank out thousands of pies an hour.

Increasingly, the city has “gone from making things to thinking about things,” said Ms. Bumpus. The home of 10 colleges and universities, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Worcester Polytechnic Institute with its biotech center Gateway Park, Worcester has been transformed to a hub of intellectual capital, focusing on biotechnology, medicine and robotics.

In the words of College of the Holy Cross historian and former city mayor John Anderson, Worcester has gone from a city of “spools and tools to eds and meds.”

The world’s top-selling pharmaceutical, the anti-arthritis drug Humira, with worldwide sales of $16 billion in 2016, was developed in Worcester at what is now AbbVie Inc. Biotechnology research and biomanufacturing, the commercialization of drugs or treatments, are seen as the wave of the future in the region.

Worcester is a natural as a biopharmaceutical manufacturing hub, says Kevin O’Sullivan, president of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, who has campaigned to establish the city as a manufacturing center for molecules used in the fight against cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

“Massachusetts is the research and development capital of the world,” said Mr. O’Sullivan. “We are the mecca, in terms of our colleges and universities, and pharma and bio companies, all across what I call this burgeoning biomedical corridor, anchored by Cambridge and Boston and Worcester. There’s a real economic westward-ho coming out this way.

“In the research and development field, we’re discovering molecules every day,” he said. “However, the bottom line is, those molecules are being manufactured in Asia and in North Carolina. We happen to be number 10 in regards to biomanufacturing.

“The way we look at it is, that’s an opportunity. We’re not going to be able to biomanufacture molecules in the Greater Boston metro area - it’s just too darn expensive. But we sure as heck can do it out here in Worcester and Central Massachusetts ... We think here in Central Mass. is the best location because of our talent in regards to workforce.”

A challenge is finding the space, says Craig Blais, president and CEO of the Worcester Business Development Corp. Manufacturers traditionally seek a large site big enough for production in a facility on one level.

“Those sites are few and far between in the city,” Mr. Blais said. “I joke that if General Motors wanted to build a plant here in Worcester, where would we put that? You think about Wyman-Gordon” - a vacant industrial site on 14 acres outside Kelley Square - “but you would need even more than that. It is an interesting dilemma (and) a challenge we have to address.

“Biomanufacturing is no different,” he said. “They don’t have to be exotic buildings or fancy buildings - they essentially just have to be good, nice, straightforward, on one level, in the range of 50,000 to 75,000 square feet. And when you layer into that parking, per zoning, you need pretty large sites.”

Last year state officials tapped WBDC to develop 44 acres on the former Worcester State Hospital campus for biomanufacturing. The new biomanufacturing park is seen providing 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Worcester and creating up to 500 jobs.

In the 1980s, WBDC developed the city’s first biotech facilities on former Worcester State Hospital land along Plantation Street off Route 9. The 450,000-square-foot complex formerly known as the Biotech Park is now the UMass Medicine Science Park, part of the research enterprise at the medical school that includes a past Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Craig Mello, on its faculty.

Mr. Blais was asked if the development and manufacture of pharmaceuticals such as AbbVie’s Humira is what he envisions if the manufacturing space he describes is found. “The answer to that is yes,” he said. “With the R & D that’s going on at UMass Medical School and the biotechnology park and the work that Abbvie’s doing, the answer is yes.”

Meantime, the cans of ginger beer roll off the line at Polar Beverages. The Goslings product is a small part of their business, but a significant one, Mr. Crowley said.

Malcolm Gosling, president and CEO of Gosling Bros., a member of the seventh generation of his family since 1806 to operate the rum company that has become synonymous with Bermuda, recalled hatching the plan for a ginger beer with Mr. Crowley eight years ago.

“Ralph and I hit it off after the first meeting,” Mr. Gosling said in a phone conversation this past week. “We were pretty good friends. He said, ‘I’ll have what we’ll call "the Malcolm run" and do just a thousand cases.’ I said, ‘Ralph, I think you’re going to need more than a thousand cases.’ "

The ginger beer has gone from nothing in early 2009 to 2 million cases a year. “Pretty remarkable,” said Mr. Gosling, who says of the Crowleys: “You could not ask for better partners.”

Mr. Crowley said he and his brother, Christopher, Polar’s vice president of manufacturing and treasurer, were in Bermuda as guests of the Goslings for the America’s Cup last month. And every gin and tonic served at the Goslings bar in the America’s Cup Village was made with Polar tonic, he said.

At Nick’s Bar, Mr. O’Connor says they go through Goslings Stormy Ginger Beer by the case. The Dark 'n' Stormy and the other well-known cocktail made with ginger beer - the Moscow Mule, made with vodka and served in a distinctive copper mug - both are popular, he said. He also serves a Kentucky Mule, made with bourbon, and planned to experiment with what he said was “supposed to be the most amazing thing on the planet,” a ginger beer margarita.

At the tavern one recent afternoon, he demonstrated how to make a Dark 'n' Stormy. “This is where the magic occurs,” he said as he poured so the rum floated atop the denser ginger beer, for a two-tone effect.

Ginger beer, once an esoteric mixer, “really is coming into its own now,” Mr. O’Connor, of Millbury, said. “Years ago, people would ask, ‘Do you have ginger beer?’ Now people just say, ‘I’ll have a Moscow Mule.’ To them it’s par for the course - there’s no trepidation when they walk into the bar. Everybody knows it’s there.”

St. Pierre Manufacturing will represent Massachusetts for a Made in America event at the White House. See Monday's Telegram & Gazette. 

“Making It in Central Mass.” is a six-part Telegram & Gazette series that explores Central Massachusetts’ legacy of farms and factories and how those hallmarks of the region are evolving to meet today’s - and tomorrow’s - needs. It also examines the challenges facing communities rooted in the heyday of bustling factories and family farms, and how they’re facing a world that seemed to speed up and globalize to something new over a generation.