Pelican Brewing marks 30 years with Maibock and new menu items
Pelican’s 30th Anniversary Maibock anchored a celebration that also pointed to expansion, with a sixth Oregon coast location on the way.
Pelican Brewing used its 30th anniversary to do more than pour a special beer. The Oregon coast brewery paired its 30th Anniversary Maibock, a strong pale German lager built to toast the company’s history, with new menu items and a slate of anniversary-month activations that made the milestone feel like a live business move, not just a backward glance.
That balance fits a brewery that has spent three decades turning a beachfront origin story into a regional footprint. Pelican was founded in 1996 in Pacific City by Mary Jones and Jeff Schons, with Darron Welch as founding brewmaster. The company now operates in Pacific City, Cannon Beach, Siletz Bay, Tillamook and Rockaway Beach, with a sixth location planned for Yachats after Pelican purchased the former LeRoy’s Blue Whale building there. The Yachats project was expected to open in the second half of 2026.
Pelican’s growth has stayed closely tied to place. Pacific City remains the birthplace of the company and the only beachfront brewpub in the Pacific Northwest, while Tillamook is home to the production brewery and the company’s largest brewery. That site has expanded with canning and bottling lines to supply beer across the Pacific Northwest, giving Pelican a production base that matches its restaurant and taproom network. Rockaway Beach adds another layer of family history, with the company noting that co-founder Mary Jones spent childhood summers near her grandparents’ cabin there.
The anniversary also underscored Pelican’s broader community identity. The brewery has linked its work to salmon, the Oregon silverspot butterfly, backpack programs, beach cleanups and meals for more than 3,000 cyclists each summer at Reach the Beach. By 2017, Pelican said it had collected more than 400 awards, a reminder that the brand’s reputation has been built on both beer and food over time.
For Pelican, the Maibock was the obvious hook, but the deeper story was durability. Thirty years in, the brewery was still treating its history as something active, using a classic seasonal lager, fresh menu items and a new location plan to show that longevity in craft beer can still look a lot like motion.
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