Edgefield Is a Little Bit Magical

2126 SW Halsey St., Troutdale, 503-669-8610, mcmenamins.com/Edgefield. Hours vary at the 10 different bars, but something's always open between 7 am and midnight daily.

In the sparse winter months, Edgefield offers a peculiar damp majesty I have known only in the Northwest: Shoes are always a little wet, the grass is unholy-green, and fallen tree branches are left to gather moss against a little red shed full of beer. At this little resort village and former poor farm in the eastern suburb of Troutdale, everything is somehow full of beer, and you're allowed to walk around with your pint glass. The shed is a bar. The cigar room next to the golf course is a bar. The old power station is a bar, and so is that utility shack with the funny lantern you've never seen open.

And each one has small-batch brews you've never tried alongside the McMenamins classics, whether a sweet-tart nectarine kettle sour, a beautifully clean "Rice, Rice, Barley" adjunct pale described with poetry somehow worse than its namesake song, a Lord of Misrule barrel-aged barleywine nearly mythic in its vanilla-coffee intensity and—holy shit—a hazy, grapefruity New England IPA called Slow Jams that's full of floral hop flavor, if also so many particulates it seems to still be settling. If you get tired of beer, they make solid wine, and great brandy, and coffee, and a really good cherry cider.

It never ends here, and it's like 15 minutes from downtown Portland, a resort you don't have to pay for like all those painfully beautiful people from California who seem to fill the place. Of all the bars and rehabbed schools and beer theaters and suburban breweries, Edgefield is the best thing the McMenamin brothers do. And it is wonderful.

Drink this: That Slow Jams is the jam, but so is the Lord of Misrule 2016. Not all the beers click, but take advantage of the aggressive barrel-aging program they've got going here. It's a treasure.