It’s cocktail hour in Portland

Maggie heads to Portland to discover exactly what it is that makes it the perfect sipping spot for whiskey cocktails

Portland has the kind of weather that makes drinking whiskey seem like a necessity. It’s never too hot and never too cold, but the rain falls in a steady drizzle. It’s the perfect weather for flannel shirts, fireplaces and gathering your friends in a warm place over whiskey cocktails. American Whiskey Magazine recently caught up with several bartenders local to the area to get their take on how

Portland does whiskey cocktails.

“Portland has a storied connection with whiskey,” says Jordan Felix, distillery ambassador at Westward Distillery. “Way back in the day we have a few records of whiskey being made down on the banks of the Willamette River, illegally on a small rudimentary still that they ran up and down the river. There are other elements of whiskey history throughout Portland. The boilermaker is always so accessible because we are such a beer town and whiskey is a natural progression from there. Boilermakers make a lot of sense. The Stillhouse out in Oregon City started to showcase that we can have really great whiskey collections and now we have several well-known whiskey bars up here. We have the perfect weather for it, very rainy, whiskey weather.”

Felix spent nearly three years behind the pine at Clyde Common, a James Beard-nominated bar and restaurant, and he helped to open the Multnomah Whiskey Library, where he worked for another four years.

“What I started to see early on in the scene was a move from vodka sodas all the time, or lighter bodied drinks, to the city really embracing the Old Fashioned and just building from there and asking for variations like Monte Carlos and Vieu Carres, those riffs of the version of the Old Fashioned,” Felix says. “Every bar here has their own burger and I feel like every bar has their own take on the Old Fashioned. It goes from their own taste profile and their take on whiskey and that dictates their menu from there on. The Old Fashioned starts as their blueprint and it goes from there.”

The relationship with whiskey is evolving, though, and there’s plenty of innovation on the horizon.

“It has only been in the last year that I’ve noticed people are taking on infusions in whiskey,” says Felix. “People have been really hesitant to do that before, but we are starting to see some savory elements, like mushrooms, being infused into whiskey, along with other flavors like fig. I’ve also seen people start to play with the Manhattan. Now we’re watching Boulevardiers show up a little more, things with Campari and Amaro.”

With such a wealth of great cocktail bars in Portland, including Normandie, The Scotch Lodge, the Multnomah Whiskey Library, Clyde Common, Hey Love, Deadshot and more, there’s plenty to choose from. So what does Felix look for when he’s going out on the town?

“If I’m out to just have a really good time I always start with an Old Fashioned,” he says. “It’s just a really triedand-true cocktail. I think a lot of bartenders will look at a Daiquiri as a way to really understand a bar’s knowledge of sweet and sour.”