Pelican at 25: a Brewer's Brewery
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Pacific City, Oregon is an unlikely beachhead for an empire. A sleepy one-time fishing village of a thousand, it is off the beaten path—in this case Highway 101—and easy to miss if you don’t turn right on Sandlake Road. Despite the fleet of dory boats that still ply the waters, the town is now mostly a vacation destination, but even that doesn’t guarantee success on the coast, where former breweries outnumber surviving ones by a fair margin. Summer crowds are large, for sure, but they vanish in the fall and don’t return again for months. Yet Pelican Brewery has not only managed to survive, but thrive, expanding to three locations (with a fourth on the way), including a production brewery that now fuels volumes of more than 40,000 barrel a year.
So-called legacy breweries haven’t been faring well lately, but Pelican has managed to grow, even during Covid. Pelican hasn’t succeeded by chasing trends, either. The brewery, headed since the first batch by Darron Welch, continues to make a range of the kind of well-crafted, true-to-style ales and lagers that have made it the most decorated brewery in Oregon. As it turns 25, Pelican offers a case study on how to age gracefully.
A Modest Start
Pacific City is one of the most beautiful spots on Oregon’s extraordinary coast. A spit of sandy rock shoots out into the sea at the north end of town—Cape Kiwanda—yet one’s eye is inevitably drawn to the 340-foot basalt rock a mile offshore. The original Pelican Brewpub sits literally on the beach—its parking lot is often obscured by sand—and positioned to take in these sights. It’s got one of the best views in the world.
It’s a perfect location for a brewery—who doesn’t want to come off the beach and grab a beer? And it may be even better in the winter, when storms blow in and provide the drama of crashing skies and surf. Yet when Jeff Schons and Mary Jones bought the derelict building Pelican would one day inhabit, they had no plan for it. “The senior partners in Pelican today had been doing some real estate work in Pacific City,” Darron said. “They met with the previous owner of what is now the Pelican building. They were talking about real estate, and apparently there was a lot of wine consumed, and they woke up the next morning and said, ‘Holy shit, did we buy a piece of property yesterday?’” Only then did they begin seriously consider what to do with it.
Built in the early 70s, the original Pelican building was a diner, pizza parlor, then used seasonally as a beach rental—and had been vacant for ten years before Jeff and Mary bought it.
They didn’t know anything about brewing, and the first order of business was finding a brewer. In 1995, they attended a brewers conference in Portland that was happening the same weekend as the Oregon Brewers Festival. A native Oregonian, Darron Welch had turned his homebrewing hobby into a professional gig and was working at a brewpub in Appleton, Wisconsin. Though the brewery was pouring at the OBF and their brewer was attending the conference, the owner didn’t pick up his tab, so Darron was attending on his own time and dime. He therefore felt no guilt when he responded to a want-ad on the bulletin board (1995, remember) saying “Beachfront brewery needs a brewer.” He has been there ever since.
A Brewer’s Brewery
Breweries have many different approaches to making and selling beer. Making the beer obviously falls to the brewer, but decisions about the kinds of beers a brewery makes, their different product lines, branding approaches, and annual calendar often issue from the owner or the sales and marketing departments. That’s especially true of breweries the size of Pelican, with six-packs in grocery stores throughout the Northwest. It’s rarer for breweries to follow the lead of the brewer, but that’s how it’s still done at Pelican. The one change, and it really emphasized to me how much this is a brewer’s brewery, is that the marketing team now has some input. “In the last 12 months or so we’ve started getting a little input from Marketing about the trends that they’re seeing, the feedback they’re seeing on social media and that sort of thing,” Darron said.
Perhaps it’s a legacy of the way Jeff and Mary built the business, relying on their brewer for all things beery. (He’s now a part-owner.) Yet it’s also absolutely integral to the brewery’s identity. As I was speaking to Darron, I mentioned that I felt I could always spot a Pelican beer. He seemed a little surprised by that, but his anniversary collaborators and former assistant brewers Whitney Burnside and Ben Love immediately agreed. It doesn’t matter if the beer in question is a cream ale, a stout, or an IPA: there’s just a Pelican-ness about the way Darron makes beers.
Mary, Darron, and Jeff with a few of their many laurels.
It starts with fidelity to style—one reason Pelican has enough medals to fill a dragon’s hoard. When Pelican releases a particular beer, it’s usually dead center in the middle of the style parameters. More important to the character of the beer is the way the composition, flavors, and other elements are always in perfect focus. There’s an almost mathematical quality to the way they beers emerge, as if a metronome hidden inside Darron’s brain is keeping perfect time.
Of course, as he’s become more self-assured, the brewery’s approach to beer has become more refined. “In the early years we made a whopping four beers plus a seasonal,” he said, marveling at how things had changed. That has made the process of beer development more stringent, though, not less.
“I push all of our R&D people to really describe the beer—what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, what the overall impression is. Tell me why this beer needs to exist. How does it fit into our lineup, how does it fit into the world of beer? Paint me a picture and tell me a story about this beer. Why is it important, why do we need to work on it?”
Tracking the evolution of the industry, Pelican now makes a lot more than four beers. (Eleven year-round beers and 26 planned package releases this year, excluding the dozens of one-offs and draft-only beers they’ll make in the pubs, if you’re counting.) The types of beer the brewery makes has also shifted. More than half the core line are hoppy ales—though only one is hazy, and it’s more partly-cloudy than full-on milkshake. Some of the classics from the early days, like Doryman’s Dark, have entered retirement. Keeping up with consumer trends, Pelican makes more offerings with fruit and they have a cocktail beer—but they’ve also started making more lagers, too. And in one case, the trends have caught up with Pelican: take for example their strong, barrel-aged specialties Darron first made for sipping while watching those winter storms.
25th Anniversary Collaborations
Among Pelican’s many legacies are the brewers who have worked with Darron and gone on to other places. (With 80 inches of rain a year, coastal living isn’t for everyone.) To celebrate their quarter century, Pelican is collaborating with some of the notables on a series of four “bird-day” beers throughout the year. First up—and available very soon—is a collaboration with 10 Barrel’s Whitney Burnside.
Founded: 1996
Tillamook brewery opened: 2013
Cannon Beach pub opened: 2016
Packaging Hall completed: 2016
Siletz Bay pub opening: 2021
Sales 2020: 41,626 barrels
GABF Best Brewery wins: 4
Total GABF medals: 41
Total medals won: 398
Most medals by beer:
- Kiwanda Cream Ale (58)
- Tsunami Stout (55)
- MacPelican Wee Heavy (50)
They started by thinking about fun beers made during Whitney’s tenure (2012-‘15) and recalled Grundy Love, a low-alcohol Belgian stout named for squat, submarine-like British tanks. “So we started thinking,” she said, “maybe we should go in the dark beer direction. Eventually we came up with an imperial porter with cocoa nibs and passion fruit.” Whitney has a culinary background and has become well-known in Portland for her unexpected creations—often employing fruit. A fruit porter? That sounds like a perfect blend of the two brewers’ styles. “It should come off as this big chocolate note up front, with a suggestion of passion fruit. I’m really interested to see how that tartness shines through,” she said. It should be out very soon, so we can all see how it works.
Next up is Gigantic’s Ben Love, who came to Pelican in 2004 from, amazingly, the same small brewpub in Wisconsin Darron started at. And, like Darron, he was a native Oregonian looking to get back home. In thinking through their collaboration, Ben also recalled the beers he liked during his tenure. He remembered Surfer Summer Ale. “But once I heard what they were doing with Whitney, I realized we could spend some money,” Ben said, laughing. “I am a big mezcal fan and I’ve been drinking a lot of it over the past year, so I pitched the idea of a beer like a cocktail I’ve been making at home. It’s basically just mezcal and citrus fruit." He knew where he could source mezcal barrels, so the idea was a riff on the two inspirations—summer ale and the cocktail. “It’s a golden ale base, then adding fruit puree to the fermentation—we’re still deciding on which.” The beer will then go in three different varieties of mezcal barrels for 12 weeks, shooting for a May release—which will coincide with the actual anniversary date.
The following two beers will be made in conjunction with Jason Schonemann of Steel Toe Brewing (August) and Hutch Kugeman of Brooklyn Brewery (November).
A Legacy Brewery Should Leave a Legacy
It’s valuable to consider Pelican in light of some of the other older Oregon breweries that lost their way. Portland Brewing closed just a week ago and offers a great contrast. Unlike Pelican, Portland cycled through brewers and continued to shift their identity over the years. (Even, at one point, their name.) Pelican has had remarkable stability. In a moment when the market favors experimentation and change, that may seem like a downside. Yet the brewery’s growth in the past five years suggests something different. By making beers familiarly Pelican-esque, the brewery can continue to offer new beers that scratch the novelty itch but still satisfy their loyal customers. A Pelican beer may be new, but it’s still a Pelican beer.
I think there’s an important lesson here. “This gets back to a fundamental idea I have about beer,” Darron said, elaborating. “There’s a time and place for each beer, and with our background as a family-friendly brewpub, we’ve had people from all walks of life. We needed to offer as broad a picture of the world of beer as we possibly could.” Pelican has been attentive to trends but they’ve never chased them and the beers have always conformed to Darron’s approach.
He may like bitterness, so his hoppy beers tend to be sharp and clean. As a brewer of a certain age—no, he hasn’t started wearing a blazer to work—he seems to prefer traditional styles, and is particularly adept at those that came from Britain. This may not be enormously fashionable, but it has become Pelican’s very clear identity—one that appeals to a broad swath of drinkers. The lesson? Clarity of purpose is a good thing. Too many breweries have no identity, no sense of self. Like a writer finding their voice, a brewer-led brewery tends to grow more familiar over time. It becomes the locus of the brewery’s identity. When you look at the grand old breweries of Europe, you find a similar clarity, one that has spoken to drinkers across the generations.
As we enter the latest era in the American brewing experiment, Pelican may offer important clues about the way forward. It’s a legacy brewery that is growing and changing, all the while staying true to itself.
Here’s to another 25—
PHOTOS COURTESY PELICAN BREWERY