New McMenamins in town has more of a campus feel and a piping masterpiece

Fans of McMenamins have come to expect the unexpected.

Over the past two decades, Oregon State University grads Brian and Mike McMenamin have built a highly successful string of 50-plus brewpubs across the Northwest that has grown to include several movie theaters, a number of historic hotels, a golf course, a vineyard and a distillery.

Now you can add the Wall of Sinks to that list.

The whimsical blend of plumbing and art is the perhaps the most noticeable feature of the brothers’ newest venture, McMenamins on Monroe, which opens Monday at 2001 N.W. Monroe Ave. in the University Center.

Constructed from 20 sinks salvaged from various McMenamins properties, the sculpture spreads like a copper and porcelain tree up the new pub’s south wall, with water cascading from sink to sink through a branching network of pipes. Several of the five artists on the company payroll painted fanciful images on the undersides of the basins, while another fashioned copper leaves that seem to sprout from the assemblage’s main stem.

“We just wanted something a little different,” said Brian McMenamin, who spent part of this week supervising the mad scramble to wrap up construction on the new pub.

The two-level, 3,800-square-foot pub will seat around 160 people and employ 40. As you might expect, the heart of the establishment is the bar, a funky freestanding hut on the ground floor.

“We always like the idea of a bar in the center,” McMenamin said. “The energy of a place flows out from the center.”

The new location will pour Terminator Stout, Hammerhead Ale and all the other McMenamins brews on tap, as well as such familiar fare as the Communication Breakdown Burger.

But it will also have a few things not on the regular menu, including pizza, calzones and the Electric Lunch, a soup-salad-breadstick combo named for an old OSU hangout that occupied the site in years gone by.

In another nod to the just-off-campus location, the pub will have a big-screen TV and several smaller monitors broadcasting sporting events. It will even host the weekly “Beaver Sports Talk” radio show with football coach Mike Riley.

“We’ll have TVs all over the place, which is a little unusual for us,” McMenamin said.

Like many of the company’s locations, this one will have its own brewery.

“We’ll have 10 (McMenamins) beers on tap at all times,” said Gary Nance, the new pub’s head brewer, as well as offerings from the likes of Corvallis’ Oregon Trail Ales and Albany’s Calapooia Brewing Co.

Nance will also concoct seasonal beers and experiment with his own recipes, McMenamin said. And he may have some help in the form of interns from OSU’s fermentation science program.

“We’ve been talking with the university for awhile about this stuff,” McMenamin said.

At one point, the brothers had planned to open a pub on the campus itself, as part of a food service complex slated for the ground floor of the new parking garage across from Gill Coliseum. But that project has stalled, and they decided to go forward with the University Center space instead.

“We’re doing a lot of projects right now,” McMenamin said, including remodeling a former funeral parlor in Portland into a new headquarters pub for the company. “This fit our window of opportunity.”

McMenamin said it was important that the new pub had a distinct personality from the company’s other Corvallis location at 420 N.W. Third St., which will remain open.

“This one will be a little more student, the other a little more family,” he said.

“They each have their own attractions,” added Mark Scanlan, who has managed the Third Street location for the past few years and will now manage the pub on Monroe.

That sense of uniqueness has always been important to the McMenamin brothers, who refuse to think of their brewpub empire as a chain, no matter how big it gets.

“Chain’s a tough word because in your mind it makes you think all the places are the same. We don’t want to do that. We go down that road and we’ll be done,” McMenamin said.

“Of course,” he added, “we haven’t done a wall of sinks before.”