Scotsman makes Ice for Scots men
Glasgow is especially busy in January - it's the Celtic Festival, a 19-day citywide celebration of Celtic music and culture. At the hub of festivities is The Royal Concert Hall where a huge number of visitors congregate to enjoy typical Scottish hospitality.
The Royal Concert Hall has seven bars just to keep up with the concert-goers refreshments. The auditorium seats 2359 people, so that's a lot of pre-show, after-show and interval drinks. But that's not all; as well as hosting some of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Hall has also built up a reputation for fine catering and excellent conference facilities.
The popular Cafe Bar serves both hot and cold snacks throughout the day and the more formal Green Room, an elegant restaurant looking out down the length of Buchanan Street across to the hills at the south of the city, is open in the evening to serve local specialities.
Like most concert halls the Royal Concert Hall operates a pre-ordering system for interval drinks. Although this eases the crush at the bar it presents problems of its own - if the drinks are laid out too early the ice in the glass melts and the customers are faced with a diluted drink with a couple of sad-looking ice cubes floating at the top.
The Royal Concert Hall has ensured against this by installing a Scotsman ACM225 Ice machine from Hubbard Ice. The ACM22's long-lasting supercube ice is ideal in this situation, it allows staff enough time to match up the orders and prepare the drinks before the customers flock into the bar area.
"When the Hall was built in 1990, the machine easily produced the amount of ice we needed, but with the amazing increase in popularity of the Celtic Festival we found it could not keep up with demand," says Charlie McAteer, Technical Services Manager. "The ACM225 was a workhorse of a machine, but we found ourselves having to buy in extra ice. It was time to get a new machine."
The technical staff at The Royal Concert Hall consulted Hubbard Ice Systems over the choice of machines. The old machine was centrally sited in the main kitchen so the ice could easily be transported to the bars and restaurants and the new machine needed to fit in the same area.
"Because the ACM225 had been so reliable we decided to stick with the Scotsman brand but look at models which could produce more ice," explained Charlie. "We chose the larger Scotsman MC15 ice machine with a B550S ice storage bin because it fulfilled all our requirements and, more importantly, the system can store more ice than our old machine."
In 24 hours the MC15 ice machine can produce 8500 cubes (170kg) of ice as opposed the smaller ACM225's 7250 cubes (145kg) - that is 1250 extra cubes, and the storage bin has a capacity of 190kg, as opposed to 70kg for the ACM225. Classic Refrigeration of Glasgow took care of fitting the machine and getting it up and running.
The MC15 machine is proving as reliable as its predecessor, producing ice for all the drinks bars, the Cafe Bar and the Green Room. It even keeps up with the portable demand from the performers' dressing rooms!
