Portland brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin have built themselves a modest empire of wondrous proportions. They operate some 56 (mostly historic) establishments. They include about 23 breweries and brewpubs, a vineyard, a really good winery and two excellent distilleries (one—Cornelius Pass—built in a barn, using age-old, traditional construction and distillation techniques). There is even a single malt whiskey, aged in bourbon barrels!
Did I mention the nine theaters? There’s at least one golf course; and eight hotels, most with bread and breakfast, in locations ranging from above Seattle, WA, on down to Roseburg in central Oregon. My favorite McM establishment has to be the legendary White Eagle on Portland’s N. Russell Street (nicknamed “Bucket of Blood” from the fighting there in the old days). Two Polish immigrants originally opened this place in 1905, offering recreation, poker, liquor and beer and a boarding house for young Polish immigrants, featuring an opium den downstairs and a brothel upstairs. Now how can you beat that for genuine historical?
The breweries reference over 200 recipes and maybe more than 500 different brews. Each brewer is expected to make all of the major McMenamin beers. They are also given artistic freedom to invent their own. Artistic? Well, yes! Mike told me, in one conversation, that he considers his brewers to be artists. And why not? This is an organization that has a company historian, Tim Hill, and a number of paint artists, all of whom are also given great creative license.
The most distinctive and interesting beer they make is the annual anniversary brew to commemorate the 1983 beginning of their first (combined brothers) venture, the Old Barley Mill Pub, here on Portland’s East side Hawthorne Street. Each year’s brew created for the July 26th anniversary is unique and distinctive.
These anniversary brews are certainly fascinating, not so much for their taste, which is great, as for their method of design. They are designed by what can only be called a Drink Tank. Drink Tank? Well, what else could we call an assemblage of people (usually 30 to 40 folks), each of whom brings a strange and exotic (or even weird) ingredient or feature to add to the current anniversary brew? Magical brews indeed!
Lunch is served and the meeting convened at a secret location—usually, as this year, at their first brewpub, South Portland’s Hillsdale Brewery and Public House. The genial Mike McMenamin chairs the activities.
The wort for the base beer will have been started and will be at a full rolling boil by now. Each Drink Tank participant brings a favorite libation or herb to add, or poem or article to read, and there is usually a musician there to contribute a musical selection from time to time. The various libations, usually including many McM beers, wines and spirits, will be sampled by all at the table. Then the remaining liquor is poured into the offerings vat, which contents will be added to the finished brew as “dry” hopping (added at the beginning of the ferment, but kept separate, after adding their essence, to be discarded early in the fermentation process).
