Jeremy Duffy and Devin Kelly
Below is one of many newspaper articles on our close client and Isle Brewers Guild. We, at Leshinsky Consulting are not just their Finance Director but are so pleased to see them accomplish the dreams.
By Paul Grimaldi
PAWTUCKET, R.I. — Break out the steins and the flagons — the city will soon be home to a new brewery, one large enough to help some of Rhode Island's young beer making operations grow beyond their startup stages.
Business partners Jeremy Duffy and Devin Kelly said they closed this week on their $1.25million purchase of 461 Main St., an industrial complex known in the city as the Kellaway Center, where they will make a home for Isle Brewers Guild. The operation won't compete with small brewers. Instead, Duffy and Kelly will partner with other beer companies, who will own shares of the Pawtucket operation. The partners aim to help what they describe as "nanobreweries," companies they said produce less than 3,000 barrels — 93,000 gallons — of beer annually. The Isle Brewers Guild operation will have a capacity of 175,000 barrels. (A barrel is equivalent to approximately 14 cases of beer, they said.) The brewery will make beer under contract for three to five craft brewers who have outgrown their own production
capacities. Duffy and Kelly are the majority owners of the brewery business, while the craft brewers each will have a minority stake.
"We offer them flexibility in terms of scale and flexibility in terms of packaging," Kelly said.
Those brewing partners will sell their beer to retail customers who come to the Main Street factory complex, as well as ship their beer to bars, restaurants and other offsite customers.
The brewery will employ 15 to 20 people at first and grow to about 40 as the business matures. In addition, brewmasters and others employed by the partner beer labels will be at the brewery.
There's also room for cold storage, as well as what the partners see as an integral part of the business — a "sampling" room and an area where people can buy
from the brewers. Duffy and Kelly plan for the brewery to become a tourist attraction, with a mezzanine in the main brewing building for tours and small events and a courtyard for outdoor festivals. That's all likely to be a draw for the people living in three nearby residential complexes — themselves carved out of old factories.
Reconstruction of the Kellaway Center will restore windows to make the brewery operation visible along Main Street as well as from the courtyard. The Isle Brewers project first was intended for the Valley section of Providence, but that 93,000 square foot building Duffy and Kelly sought burned down before they could purchase it.
The partners spent months looking for another site before settling on the Pawtucket location, just off Exit 27 from Route 95. The Kellaway Center, at 130,000 square feet, is both larger and more conveniently organized than the Providence site, Duffy said, as it offers ready offices for
their business, a natural courtyard and rentable commercial space in separate buildings. It's unclear how many of the center's 30 or so existing tenants will stay as part of the conversion.
"I would like to create a food and beverage campus," Duffy said.
Potential environmental issues are small as the site previously had been converted from factory use, to a distribution hub, to its current mixed use. Pawtucket officials have worked readily with the partners to facilitate the project, including rezoning the property to once again allow manufacturing, as well as on a financing package.
Construction will begin in December with the brew house, Kelly said, with the first ounces of beer flowing in the summer or early fall of 2016.
pgrimald@providencejournal.com
(401) 2777356
On Twitter: @PaulEGrimaldi