In Our View: Couv’s coffee cred adds to cultural kudos

Vancouver is positively percolating with plaudits.

In 2015, Amazon.com deemed the city the fifth-most romantic in the country — a designation that we, um, love. In 2017, MoveHub.com named Vancouver the “Most Hipster City in America,” which led now-Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle to declare, “I had to figure out what a hipster was. We’re glad the hipsters are with us. And, you know, I’ll have to consider getting a tattoo.”

And now the city has been dubbed the No. 2 “coffee city” in the U.S. according to something called ApartmentGuide.com. You can take that with a grain of salt — or a shot of espresso — but we will gladly embrace this new-if-surprising status.

Undoubtedly, such rankings are open to debate if not outright dispute; websites love to rank things, and those rankings arrive with varying degrees of veracity. There’s even a website that allows users to “vote on everything,” although we’re not sure “everything” includes the best coffee cities in America.

Anyway, ApartmentGuide.com has figured out that Vancouver has 78 coffee shops. A quick drive around town might lead to the impression that we have 78 Starbucks, but apparently not. There is a thriving market of independent coffee shops, many locally owned and not bolstered by the global branding that is Starbucks.

Compared with other cities that have a population of at least 100,000, that makes Vancouver the second-best coffee city in the country. We have one coffee shop for every 2,224 residents, behind only Berkeley, Calif., and its one shop for every 2,073 residents. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, but who are we to argue with the conclusion? Vancouverites love their coffee, and numerous local entrepreneurs are taking advantage of that by carving out a niche alongside the corporate behemoths. You could say … we’re roasting the competition (sorry).

Not surprisingly, four cities on the list are in the Northwest, with No. 4 Seattle, No. 5 Portland and No. 9 Everett joining Vancouver in the Top 10. Berkeley and San Francisco (No. 3) give the West Coast a monopoly on the top five spots.

All of this follows the ranking from MoveHub that had Vancouver as the most hipster city in the country thanks to a proliferation of brewpubs, tattoo parlors and other benchmarks of hipster culture. As the website explained: “In our groundbreaking new study, hipster fashion, diet, and vanity were all taken into account as the 150 most populous American cities had their credentials tested. No editorializing here; just data. Pure, bohemian data.”

If that is groundbreaking, the latest ranking must be … grounds-breaking (sorry again).

While coffee might be universal, hipster culture might require some explanation. As UrbanDictionary.com tells it: “Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s that value independent thinking, counterculture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.”

The intelligence and witty banter are self-evident. The progressive politics and indie rock, well, that’s why we have Portland. But the gist of all this is that Vancouver is outgrowing its many nicknames that double as pejoratives and is fully embracing its status as the Couv. And a strong economy has made the city a hot spot for innovation.

And so we will gladly accept our status as a hub for coffee and for hipster culture and even for romance. In other words, there are, um, perks to living here.