USA, MA: Loophole Brewing Services planning new brewery at Ludlow Mills complex

Loophole Brewing Services plans to build a 21,000 square-foot brewery, tap room, and beer garden in a former jute processing building at the Ludlow Mills complex, masslive.com reported on July 17.

Loophole announced this week plans to buy the building and 2.5-acres of land at 90 First Ave. from Ludlow Mills owner from WestMass Development Corp, a not-for-profit, real estate and economic development corporation.

“Putting together a project like this in the midst of a pandemic is not easy, but WestMass has been a wonderful partner in working with us,” said Aaron Saunders, Loophole’s co-founder. “The investments made by WestMass, as well as the town, state, and federal governments in the Mills have helped make this a top-notch location for Loophole.”

Loophole would be the second brewery in the complex. It will join Iron Duke, which is changing its name to avoid a trademark dispute with Duke university.

Saunders said having the two breweries in the same complex — one also shared by small manufacturers, housing, a senior center and senior housing and a rehabilitation hospital — has the potential to help both Loophole and Iron Duke.

“We are really excited about it. We look at it as additive,” Saunders said. “It’s not so much from a competitive perspective.”

The plan is that beer aficionados will make a tour of Loophole, Iron Duke at the mill complex, Vanished Valley in Ludlow and Fieldcrest Brewing Co. in Wilbraham.

Loophole’s three founders — Jeffery “Heffe” Goulet, Saunders and Todd Snopkowski — had proposed building their brewery in Holyoke. But now that won’t happen, Suanders said.

Loophole will have its own beers, including one it already has on the market, and will also serve as a contract brewer making beer for other brands that lack breweries of their own. Currently, Loophole is itself using a contract brewer.

WestMass bought 170-acre Ludlow Mills in 2008 and began rehabbing the site for mixed use development.

The site has a long history. The Ludlow Manufacturing and Sales Co. made cloth, rope and twine out of Indian-grown jute, flax and hemp from the 1868s through the 1970s.

At its height in the years before World War I, Ludlow Manufacturing had about 4,000 employees and many of them children. But the Great War disrupted the supply of jute fiber from India, so the company decided to open a mill there instead and started shifting production overseas and the Ludlow complex declined for years.

For decades the mill complex has been subdivided and made into workshops and warehouses for a number of businesses.

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