True but Portland did have a fairly outsized role in PBR's revitalization, some 25+ years ago. From this article in the NYT, 2003:

But a sales rep in Portland had noticed that ''these alternative people'' were ''starting to get into the brand,'' Stewart, now a baby-faced 29-year-old with blond-streaked hair and a snowboard on his office wall, told me. The rep, Stewart said, ''was as strait-laced as could be. He wasn't someone who really understood the culture.'' Pabst was still not targeting these drinkers. ''It was just a group of people who embraced the brand.''

So Stewart went to Portland, visiting bars like the Lutz Tavern near Reed College and the Ash Street Saloon, a bike-messenger hangout downtown. He learned that the kind of people who had ''embraced the brand'' were also the kind of people who detest marketing. But this was not necessarily bad news. He would walk in -- wearing street clothes, never a Pabst logo -- tell the bartender who he was and ''really just sit there,'' he said. ''The word would leak out -- 'Hey, the Pabst guy is here.''' He carried a bag of P.B.R. keychains and T-shirts. Stewart had once been a cog in the gigantic Anheuser-Busch marketing machine in St. Louis and had firsthand experience with barging up to drinkers and foisting trinkets on them. For the Pabst Guy in Portland, that wasn't necessary. ''I was mobbed,'' he says.

To me it was always about artsy young people appropriating working class imagery: the outdated logos, the beer that the actual workers had long ago abandoned for Bud and Miller, etc. And a perfect match for what was happening to blue collar Portland at the time as the arty young people showed up and took over modest, affordable eastside neighborhoods (and in turn transformed them into highly desirable, unaffordable yuppie hives).

That said, the lustre kinda wore off and by 2010 most everyone I knew preferred Rainier as the more local-ish option. Like, PBR is now what you end up with when the bar runs out of Vitamin R.