Brothers brew up an empire
BEND, Ore. — Raising his voice over a cacophony of hammering and drilling, Mike McMenamin explains why he and his brother Brian make a seven-hour roundtrip journey from Portland every Wednesday to watch construction crews in Bend tear apart and rebuild the 68-year-old St. Francis of Assisi School.
“Some people would say we’re way too involved,” he shouts, gesturing around at the project that will soon be the latest in a string of pubs to carry the brothers’ name. “But that’s just the way we are. We’re hands on.”
Hands on or not, it seems to work. The Old St. Francis School, as it’s called at McMenamins Inc., will open this fall as the 53rd in the company’s empire of pubs, theaters and hotels stretching along the Interstate 5 corridor from Roseburg, Ore., to Mill Creek, Wash.
The Bend complex will be the first east of the Cascade mountains but merely one more in a series of historic renovations for the company.
“They are legends,” Paul Shipman, founder and president of Seattle’s Redhook Brewing Co. said of Mike McMenamin, 53, and Brian McMenamin, 46. “What these guys have done utterly defies conventional wisdom.”
Conventional wisdom in the industry says one-off pubs and taverns always outdraw chain-owned operations because people like the feel of a locally owned watering hole. But McMenamins keeps on growing.
“They got a concept, stayed true to it, build it like they wanted to build it and now they’ve become the name in microbreweries,” said Bill Perry of the Oregon Restaurant Association.
The brothers spent a recent day in Bend checking out the bars being built, watching contractors install custom lights and strolling around to get the feel of rooms as walls went up.
“The initial plans are just sort of a starting point,” said Mike McMenamin. “You have to wait till a project is taking shape before you know where it’s going.”
That attitude has lead to midstream changes at nearly all the McMenamins building sites. But that, too, is part of the reason the brothers’ vision of iconoclastic gathering spots has captured Northwest beer drinkers’ imagination, allowing the company to tap into regional demand for craft brews.
The company has grown during the past decade more or less in lock step with the region’s growth in microbrew consumption. More than 10 percent of the Oregon beer consumed in 2003 was from craft breweries, three times the national average of 3.25 percent.
The brothers, majority owners of their private company, are close-lipped about financial details. But they say 2003 sales were more than $70 million, up from a reported $50 million in 1998.
The genesis of the McMenamins’ kingdom was a 1973 trip to Europe that Mike McMenamin took with his wife. They were charmed by pubs in Britain, beer gardens in Germany, coffee shops in Cyprus.
The places served alcohol, but they weren’t the dark, smoky taverns found in the United States where a mostly male clientele went to imbibe. Instead, they were cheery establishments where whole families assembled, adults ordering beer, wine or coffee while the children snacked and played.
As the brothers race through the Bend school on a recent day, it’s clear they are still having a good time.
“When you start putting a few pieces here, moving things around there, it kind of goes from there,” Mike McMenamin said. “There’s a kind of creative process and that always costs more money, you know. But it’s a helluva lot of fun.”