Pelican Brewing Launches Spring Lager Collab and Bold Triple IPA

Pelican Brewing kicked off its spring release slate with two beers at opposite ends of the gravity spectrum: Mr. Lager's Neighborhood, a 5.7% collaboration lager built on Strata and Cashmere hops, and Overboard Triple IPA, the brewery's high-ABV seasonal entry for hop collectors.

Mr. Lager's Neighborhood launched at a brewers' dinner called "Won't You Be My Lager?", where Pelican reunited with Grand Fir Brewing's Whitney Burnside. The event served as the opening of a new Pelican collaboration series designed to spotlight Pacific Northwest brewer partnerships. After the dinner, the lager moved into wider distribution out of Pelican's Tillamook production brewery, landing in cans and on draft across the Pacific Northwest.

The beer runs on Strata and Cashmere hops, delivering notes of honeydew, tangerine, and marionberry. That's a distinctly fruit-forward profile for a lager, and at 5.7% it sits well below the ABV range Pelican typically anchors its coastal reputation to.

Brewmaster Darron Welch grounded the collaboration series in explicitly community terms. "We want to pay tribute to the hardworking brewers who are pursuing their passions every day and making great beers for their neighborhoods," he said. The beer's name and the dinner's title both reinforce the point: this collab format is as much about celebrating regional craft culture as generating new SKUs.

Overboard Triple IPA landed alongside Mr. Lager's Neighborhood as the louder half of the spring launch. Pelican timed the release for outdoor and seasonal drinking, though triple IPA strength puts it squarely on hop-head comparison shelves as well. Both beers are available in cans and on draft through Pelican's Pacific Northwest distribution network.

The pairing reflects a dual-track release approach that extends reach without cannibalizing a core lineup. The lager addresses a style that craft drinkers have been actively seeking and that many regional breweries still underserve; the triple IPA feeds the social-media buzz cycle. Running both through a single spring launch, with a collaboration dinner as the ignition event, keeps production costs lean and earned media high.

Burnside and Welch share a brewing history that predates the dinner, which gives the series a credibility that purely transactional collabs often lack. If the pace of this opening release holds, more "Won't You Be My Lager?" format events with Northwest brewing names are likely to follow before the year is out.