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Mike and Brian McMenamin had a simple idea: Every place in Oregon would be better with a beer. Cinemas. Schools. Churches. Funeral parlors. The McMenamin brothers bought them all, painted them with Lyle Hehn’s Grateful Dead-inflected murals, and started pouring Hammerhead Ale and Terminator Stout. “Every morning, every beer drinker in Oregon should bow to the east and say a prayer to Mike McMenamin,” the late Horse Brass barkeep Don Younger told WW for a 1998 cover story on the chain (characteristically, our angle was a misguided worry that McMenamins was expanding too fast).
The watershed moment was 1985, when Mike (bushy beard) and Brian (big mustache) successfully lobbied in Salem for a bill allowing beer to be sold in the same place it was brewed. Thus, the brewpub was born—and the brothers launched Oregon’s first, Hillsdale Brewery and Public House, on Southwest Sunset Boulevard the same year (and sent its beer to their first bar, the Barley Mill on Hawthorne). A real estate buying spree followed, as the McMenamins spent much of the ‘90s converting abandoned properties into cozy bars with fireplaces and baskets of tater tots. The crown jewel was Edgefield, a onetime poor farm in Troutdale that became a Disneyland of day drinking.
Carry it forward: The McMenamins now operate 56 pubs, concert halls and hotels; long may their taps run. But their greater legacy is one of boundary-busting: When they had an idea that wasn’t possible, they changed the rules to make it happen. “We are most proud of the lasting relationships we’ve built in our communities,” said Shannon McMenamin, Mike’s daughter, in a statement to WW. “We hope to continue our legacy of fun long into the future through everything we enjoy (art, history, architecture, music, food, drink, and general merriment).”
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