607 E Main St., Battle Ground, Wash., 360-342-8111. Noon-11 pm Monday-Sunday.
Barrel Mountain is Battle Ground's most beautiful hang. It's like the collected casts of Dazed and Confused and Heavy Metal Parking Lot collected in a wood-grained cabin—actually a former Laundromat built up from spare odds and ends from owner Troy Steigman's family larders.
The walls and ceiling are covered in leftover "Beer" signs alongside frontier pots and pans, roto-sawblades and ski poles. There's a chair made of ropes. The food's a funny mix of bistro burgers and bar wings and $18 "adult mac 'n' cheese" with pork belly and asparagus, while the bar's a lovable mix of metalhead ladies with Farrah Fawcett wings, heshers who like hip-hop and midlife car mechanics.
The beer turns out to be an equal hodgepodge. The five-hopped, five-malted No Bad Days IPA was having a bad day on our visit—a bit farmy and oxidized, though we've praised it in the past. But we loved the excellent Starway Stout, all roasty fig and chocolate, with heartening depth and an equally heartwarming 6.6-percent ABV.
Drink this: That figgy Starway Stout.
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This Year's Guide Is Dedicated to Dean Pottle
An Oral History of the Horse Brass
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