Spend a few days in Portland, and you soon realise the craft brewing, coffee roasting and urban winemaking are about passion rather than a desire to be hip.
Portland’s hipster reputation
In the couple of decades, Portland has burst from basically not having a reputation at all to being an epicentre of hipsterdom. Go to Oregon’s biggest city on stereotype alone, and you might be expecting some sort of semi-mystical forest glen surrounded by mountains, where everyone has a beard, brews their own beer, wears a checked lumberjack shirt and listens constantly to Fleet Foxes.
The reality of Portland, Oregon
The reality isn’t quite so much like that. Portland is unquestionably a city, rather than some cute small town that has attracted fey indie-loving microbrewers. In fact, it’s a reasonably sprawling city that’s largely flat and at odds with the surrounding natural beauty of Oregon. Some would go as far as saying it’s aggressively ugly. Away from the parks on the fringes it can come across as rather grey and overly functional, with parts on the eastern side of the Willamette River looking suspiciously like one giant industrial estate.
Lack of tourist attractions in Portland
It is also a city that, with the best will in the world, isn’t exactly brimming with tourist attractions. The Oregon Historical Society and World Forestry Center provide a reasonable museum hit, but there’s not much else to get excited about. And yet, despite this rather unappealing pitch, Portland has become a genuinely fascinating place to visit.
The truth behind Portland’s hipsterism
Hipsterism is a broad brush term, usually used in a derogatory manner and often applied to those slavishly following trends purely because they think it makes them look cool. It’s often applied to Portland, but spend any time there, and it becomes obvious that this definition really doesn’t apply. The facial hair tends to be a result of laziness or personal comfort rather than spending a fortune at the barber’s styling it. And there’s no breathless pursuit of the hot new opening – Portlanders have a tendency to cherish new things because they’re high quality and inventive, rather than because they’re new and have a glossy gimmick.
Portland’s craft beer scene
The beer scene is what the city is best known for – and there are scores of microbreweries within Portland’s boundaries. But the period of everyone trying to outdo each other with viciously strong IPAs called “Hopzilla” has long gone. Some breweries specialise in sour beers, others golden ales, others stouts. And there’s no making people line up outside-style showiness about it, either. It’s people who are interested in beer, trying to make the best beer they can, while being able to experiment with new ideas and make it into a viable business.
Urban wineries in Portland
The same applies to the mushrooming band of urban wineries, which buy grapes in from the surrounding valleys, Washington and California, then make and store the wines in the city. Over a tasting flight at Enso – which is inside an old mechanic’s shop – chatting to the guy behind the bar leads to an impassioned discussion of his time spent learning the trade in Australia’s McLaren Vale.
These people aren’t doing what they do because it’s cool to do so – they’re doing it because Portland has created an environment where they can follow their interests and make a living out of it.
Quality over cool
Once you click that Portland has little interest in following trends, you start to see this hard-working creative industriousness everywhere. The city is full of coffee roasters, ice cream makers, distillers, bakers, restaurateurs and specialist clothes-makers, many of whom have come from interstate to be somewhere that allows them to do what they’ve dreamed of. If that’s hipsterism, then the world needs more of it.
More Pacific Northwest travel
For a range of Portland tours and activities, hunt here.
Other Pacific Northwest travel articles on Planet Whitley include:
- The seedy history of Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels.
- A review of the Klondike Goldrush National Historical Park in Seattle
