Imagine this: After you’ve placed your order for a pepper bacon cheeseburger (or spicy Anasazi bean burger or wild Alaskan halibut fish ’n’ chips), you skip the soda and make a beer-ikaze with splashes of IPA, porter, pilsner, saison, and raspberry wheat. The Vancouver, Washington, based Burgerville, which operates 40 locations mostly in and around the Portland metro area, has quietly served beer at its White Salmon Salmon Creek restaurant in Washington and at the PDX airport. Now, Burgerville's SE Hawthorne location has applied for a license and hopes to begin slinging beer next month.

The general manager said they’d start with about five different 12-ounce bottles of rotating local brands (including Rainier, naturally). Alas, that rules out polishing off a 750-millilitre bottle of Logsdon Farmhouse Ales’s Cerasus—a Flanders Red-style sour ale brewed with Hood River cherries—to complement the pulled pork sandwich with cherry slaw, but a can o’ Laurelwood’s Red Elephant IRA will do the trick. Furthermore, the Hawthorne Burgerville envisions becoming a full-serve growler station at some point. The locavore-oriented chain will be the first fast-food restaurant to vend beer in Oregon, but not in America (Burger King rolled out BK Whopper Bars in Orlando, Vegas, and New York, although the Big Apple location shuttered after failing health inspections.) We suspect that Louisiana- and Mississippi-style drive-throughs with chocolate-stout milkshakes or even growlers-to-go would be not be deemed kosher by the OLCC, but if this gets off the ground, at least diners in the vicinity of the Hawthorne store have an option to skip the line at Lardo across the street.