Ben's Bottle Shop: Bar Review

Vancouver's most modern bottle-shop and beery sports bar.

Vancouver is growing up beer-strong and hardy. Indeed, it has become Portland's beeriest suburb by far, with four new breweries this past year, plus more stirring in Camas. But not all its beers have been traveling across state lines. You can now visit most of them at Ben's Bottle Shop (8052 E Mill Plain Blvd., 360-314-6021, bensbottleshop.com), the 'Couv's most modern bottle shop and sporty beer pub to date.

Ben's is a big-box beer barn in a strip mall just off I-205, and it can be wall-to-wall barrel chests and baseball caps on game days, with a rear-wall flat-screen the size of some cars. One wall of the bar hosts what appears to be acid-seared metal squares, a sort of brawny abstract art project.

Ben's Bottle Shop photo by Bridget Baker

The menu is pulled-pork nachos, beer-cheddar mac and cheese, and a prodigious wealth of sliders. But from anywhere around the huge rectangle of a bar, you can order from a digital tap list of 24 beers that probably include Breakside and Fat Head's, sure, but also maybe a Ghost Runners red—the industrial-park Vancouver brewery's best beer—among small-tank selections from Kennewick and Airway Heights, Wash.

Ben's Bottle Shop photo by Bridget Baker

Other Washington brews find their way into the 10 beer-case selections that line the left side of the bar, which glow like Beulah. A recent trip netted an excellent Topcutter IPA from Yakima's Bale Breaker, which you can't buy in Oregon but really want to. It may be a slight adjustment for Portlanders to conduct beer tourism the wrong way across the Columbia—but don't worry. You'll get used to it. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

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