Andy's Old Port Pub

Andy's Old Port Pub sits on Commercial Street looking out at Portland's working waterfront, which is a more honest view than the postcard version — fishing boats, ferries and the occasional cruise ship rather than a tidied-up marina. It is a pub in the straightforward sense: beer, a long bar, food all day, live music.

Its alcohol-free offering is a stocked selection of canned and bottled non-alcoholic drinks plus house-made mocktails. That pairing is more thoughtful than it first appears, because non-drinkers split into two groups with different needs. Some want a constructed drink — something with balance and a bit of ceremony. Others emphatically do not: they want a cold can, no conversation, no fuss, and nothing that draws attention at the bar. Most venues serve one of those and ignore the other. Andy's covers both.

A note on sourcing: at least one local guide attributes specific mocktail names to this pub while another attributes the same names elsewhere, so this listing deliberately describes the offering rather than naming drinks that may belong to a different bar. Worth asking what is on when you arrive.

The hours are the strongest argument for knowing about it. It opens at 11am Monday to Friday, at 7:30am on Saturday for breakfast, at 9am on Sunday, and closes at 1am every single night. Portland's better alcohol-free drinking is otherwise locked into narrow windows — Hunt & Alpine opens at 3pm and closes Mondays, Arcadia opens at 5pm and closes Tuesdays, Lava Kava runs 5pm to 10pm. A harbourside pub open eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, with something genuinely drinkable for a non-drinker, is a useful thing to have in your back pocket. It is also directly on the waterfront, which makes it the obvious place to send someone who wants the view without the wine list.