Remembering Ray: Community mourns the loss of brewery owner

BRATTLEBORO — An aging building, a little bit of stubbornness and an untimely storm all may have led to the loss of a local icon, Ray McNeill, the owner of McNeill’s Brewery on Elliot Street.

The call came in at 7:45 p.m. on Dec. 2 about a fire at the brewery just as nearby Gallery Walk events were finishing up. No one knew if anyone was in the building at the time of the fire. It was later discovered that Ray was inside the apartment above the bar.

In his early years, Ray went to Bennington College to study music. There, he met his wife, Holiday Eames, hitchhiking with a cello on her way to orchestra rehearsal at the Sage City Symphony. He played the violin and told everyone that night that he was going to marry Holiday.

They were married from 1982 until 2000. Her brother, Allen Eames, started a bar in Portland, Maine, called Three Dollar Deweys, which was very successful, and in trying to build off that success, he opened another location in Brattleboro in 1985.

“He invited us to come to take a look at it and we never looked back,” said Holiday. “We started bartending that night. We never even had a chance to go back and get our stuff.”

Eve Nyrhinen, Ray’s eldest child, remembers that her parents worked around the clock.

“They didn’t have anywhere else to put me, and I remember things like, one of them would work the day shift, and then they would hand me off and the other would work the night shift and they worked seven days a week for years,” said Eve.

In 1988, Vermont legalized brewpubs and Greg Noonan, who had spent three years lobbying for it, opened Vermont Pub & Brewery in Burlington. Ray McNeill would travel to another brewery open at the time, Catamount Brewing Co., in White River Junction, for a year to learn how to become a brewer in the late ‘80s.

“We were pretty poor, and then having him working this side gig was an act of faith,” said Eve. “I remember, he would drive with me up to White River Junction and leave me with a stack of books in their malt room, and I would just read all day until he was done, then we drive home.”

The early operations for Ray were small, brewing out of pickle barrels, and he had this dream that he wanted to open a microbrewery, a pub brewery similar to the old Scotch Irish tradition. He wanted to make the beer downstairs and serve it fresh.

“Ray really wanted to brew and we didn’t have any space for a brewery [at the Three Dollar Deweys location on South Main Street],” said Holiday. “We started looking for a bigger place where we could put the tanks and we found the firehouse on Elliot Street. It was in terrible shape. It had a hole in the roof and dead pigeons on the floor, but we could afford it so we took it.”

Eve said that her parents poured everything they had into renovating it.

“They saved all their tips to buy that building; they put down $2,300 in crumpled $1 bills to buy it,” said Eve. “All their friends made the furniture and did the floors, the paintings. Ripped down walls and turned it into a brewery.”

Eve remembers that for 10 years, Ray put his boots on and went down to the brewery every single day. “He went down when he was sick, and he went down on my birthday, and he went down on Christmas. And he never took a day off. We never took a vacation.

“We lived there. We ate there. We worked there. It was really our life. There was no way to leave. We were open seven days a week. We never went anywhere,” said Holiday.

Taylor McNeill, Ray’s youngest child, had a complex relationship with Ray, which became distant over the years. Taylor said Ray had attributes that helped him with the business.

“He was so incredibly sociable; I cannot remember a time where we’d even walk a block in Brattleboro together where he couldn’t stop and talk to somebody that he knew,” said Taylor. “He’d always remember details about people, he was always connecting with people. I think that’s how he built the bar and brewery. He was also an extremely driven person. He always had ideas for the bar and brewery that were very ambitious, sometimes a little outrageous.”

Taylor went into mathematics, a trait that Ray used to talk about when brewing beer. He used math and science to create the blend for a good brew. Taylor added that being good with math and science made Ray a very black-and-white thinker. Taylor struggled with Ray’s black-and-white thinking, which left little room for error.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, forcing McNeill to close the brewery in March of that year. He was planning to reopen when, in June of this year, he was told the building was not structurally sound, which devastated him.

“He planned to just rebuild. I tried to talk him into leave it, retire, go to Mexico,” said Eve. “You’ve lived your dream, and he wouldn’t let it go. A lot of people tried to talk him into moving out of that apartment in that building. No one was ever going to tell that man what to do. I think that was one of the keys to his success and maybe one of the factors in (this) tragedy.”

Eve, in an essay published on social media, said Ray knew he couldn’t open the bar this winter and that he didn’t need to be there for construction. She added Ray was told that the renovations would be easier if he moved out during that time. He was told in June that due to the structural instability of the building, the fire department would not be able to send a crew in there safely if a fire were to break out. There hadn’t been a fire in his 30-some years there, and he had an extensive sprinkler system, so he chose to stay.

“He booked a tiny beach house in Baja, and planned to drive out here to Reno (where Eve lives) to spend some time with his grandkids and then drive on there,” Eve wrote. “He drained the sprinkler system so the pipes wouldn’t freeze while he was gone. He had ‘a few more errands’ to do, and there were storms rolling into the Rockies and around Reno that weekend, so he stayed a few extra days in Brattleboro.”

Eve added that it never occurred to anyone that it was unsafe for him to stay in his apartment after the sprinkler system had been drained. She said the fire likely started from an old multi-port electrical outlet behind his TV, next to stacks of magazines. She speculated that he was probably asleep when it happened, as he’d told several people he was going to bed shortly before. Brattleboro Fire Chief Len Howard said in a news release that there were too many factors in play to be able to determine the cause of the fire.

“It looks like he awoke to an apartment full of smoke and fire, and between the smoke and carbon monoxide he only made it to the top of the stairs before he collapsed,” Eve wrote. “My understanding is that smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning makes a person giddy, happy, and unafraid in their last few moments, and I’d like to think that his death was like this, as peaceful as death by fire could be. His body was not burned, and he was not trapped.”

She wrote that it took at least 90 minutes for firefighters to break through the right part of the roof to sight him, “and at that point, they were certain he was dead. Due to concerns that the recently burned and completely soaked wood floor might collapse, (responders) couldn’t risk a firefighter’s life to check.” She wrote that the responders brought in an engineer to try and assess the situation, but were told they needed to wait for a team to come in the morning before attempting to get inside.

“I was an EMT in college, and the one cardinal, the inviolable rule was that you do not proceed onto a scene until it is cleared for safety. You cannot risk losing a second life,” Eve wrote. “My heart goes out to the firefighter who had to climb back down that ladder and tell the crowd they have done everything they could. As a doctor, I remember the names and families of every patient I have failed to save. Each one was followed by months where I tortured myself with alternate scenarios where they might have lived.”

“I promise you no one in that fire station wanted my father to die. There is something called Second Victim Syndrome, which describes the way a doctor tortures themselves after the death of a patient they failed to save,” Eve wrote. “I’m sure firefighters experience it too. I hope they are not haunting themselves with the what-ifs. Please extend your love and support to the Brattleboro Fire Department. They followed protocol. They made decisions that might have prevented losing a second young hero’s life.”

Eve added that her father was very single-minded; he had a dream, and no one was going to talk him out of it. She added that for years, he would go down before the sun rose, and he would come up after the sun had set. He told her those were the happiest years of his life, when he was building that brewery. She said she remembered the day her father received a call that he had won his first World Beer Cup award. There were many more awards to follow. McNeill is considered a pioneer in the Vermont microbrew industry, and he made McNeill’s a destination venue for craft beer enthusiasts in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Eve also reflected on the community he had built around McNeill’s before his death.

“I can’t count how many texts and messages and photos I’ve gotten and people who say that he helped them when they were homeless, or they were a single parent trying to keep the heat on or they were an immigrant who didn’t speak much English, and he found them a place to stay and he gave them a job,” said Eve. “Even when they were so bad that they had to be fired. He hired them again the next week and treated them like family. I remember him complaining about bartenders who couldn’t show up for work or who were stealing liquor. He would keep them. They are supporting a family. He was really committed to the community he built and he cared a lot about his employees and his patrons.”

On Saturday, there is going to be a celebration of Ray’s life at The Stone Church in Brattleboro from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eve said the guy who made the classic tie-dyed T-shirts in the ‘90s for her dad has offered to print shirts for the occasion. There are also many breweries donating beer for a toast to Ray.

“My father always went out of his way to support local businesses, help out his friend, invest in his neighbor,” said Eve. ”I hope we can all be driven to do that again.”

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