You Don’t Have to be a Seasoned Industry Vet to Appreciate the Cheap Beer and Strong Cocktails Served at Shift Drinks

Shift Drinks presumes its clientele works downtown, lives somewhere else and mostly hates this arrangement.

(Rachael Renee' Levasseur)
By Pete Cottell

1200 SE Morrison St., 503-922-3933, shiftdrinkspdx.com. 4 pm-2:30 am Monday-Friday, 5 pm-2:30 am Friday-Saturday.

Established: May 2015

Shift Drinks presumes its clientele works downtown, lives somewhere else and mostly hates this arrangement. Rather than drown the pain of the proletariat with cheap beer and a fuck-'em-all attitude, this high-ceilinged cathedral of champagne, cocktails and cheese plates offers a novel concept in post-work pleasure—that your hard work has earned you a certain level of niceties. Shift Drinks' "happy hour" menu goes into great detail to clarify its ethos, which acknowledges through its all-day availability that not all wage earners can drink on the cheap at exactly 4 pm every day. It also presumes that discounting a $10 cocktail by $1 is a joke to those who actually receive shift drinks, which informs a selection of discounted snacks like a Cubano ($6) or a manchego, apple and nuts platter ($5) that pairs well with Shift Beer ($3), a light and toasty Pilsner brewed specially for the bar by Royale. You needn't be a seasoned industry vet to appreciate cheap beer and strong cocktails served in an unpretentious space, but damn will that gin and tonic taste all that much better when it bookends a day of retail or service-industry hell.

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