In case you hadn’t heard, Pelican Brewing’s Kiwanda Cream Ale is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The beer, which has become ubiquitous with Oregon’s Coast (who hasn’t had a cold one on the beach at their taproom in Pacific City?), has an interesting backstory and history. Its beginnings were, not surprisingly, in homebrewing. 

Darron Welch, co-owner and brewmaster at Pelican Brewing Company, started out as a homebrewer. Shortly after high school he took a gap year in Germany and discovered that he did not only like beer, he loved it. 

“It was my first real opportunity to just start scratching the surface of the world of beer flavor and the variety that was possible,” said Welch. After coming back to the States, he brewed his first beer. Because his dad had to purchase the ingredients, they split the finished beer. “It was an equitable arrangement. And I think we did just a simple golden ale of some variety. And it was okay. But it definitely tasted like something, and it had a little more oomph to it than, say, Rainier.” 

The seed was planted. 

Flash forward to the mid-90s and the opening of Pelican Brewing Company. One of the beers Welch wanted to produce was a revival of a 19th Century, pre-Prohibition type of cream ale. First crafted in the mid-1800s as a competitor to mass market lagers in the U.S. before small brewers had the ability or equipment to produce industrialized versions to compete with their European counterparts. Cream Ale was similar to a bigger and fuller version of a Kolsch until the style was nearly killed off by Prohibition. During this time it is said that Canadian brewers took up brewing cream ale, refining it to some degree before it made somewhat of a comeback. Though many of the original recipes were long lost.

After researching and reading about the origins of the U.S. brewing industry, and the story of how Colonial-era brewers were being superseded by German immigrants, Welch had the vision for Kiwanda Cream Ale, which became the first ever seasonal for Pelican Brewing in 1996.

“I just found that kind of an interesting, fascinating story. And it felt to me like there was a lost gem amongst beer styles there. I just kind of put myself in the shoes of a brewer from that era,” he said.

Kiwanda Cream Ale could be considered an ale brewers’ riff on lagers. At the time craft beer drinkers weren’t drinking a lot of pilsners and most breweries weren’t set up to make them. You could say that the pre-prohibition style was created to compete in that market while introducing customers to a lighter but more flavorful beer.

Kiwanda went through a couple of tinkerings early on before it settled into its present format with some adjustments. A part of that early adjustment and iteration of Kiwanda was a progressive removal of hops from the kettle. And that was informed by, first of all, the sensory of tasting the beer and saying, "This is too bitter." 

“We've always kind of aspired to have a more robust QA program than other breweries our size. We were doing chemical-physical analysis with an outside lab, we partnered with outside labs very early on. So, in the late 90s, as the beer was getting refined, I was getting bitterness measurements back from our lab service. And I could see both from the lab reports but also from the palate, it's still too bitter. So it kept coming up, and it got down to the point where all the hops were gone, except the whirlpool hops. And then we hit the target right on the head, so to speak,” says Welch. 

With Kiwanda, all of the hops go in at whirlpool. There are no hops added during the boil. There's no first wort hopping. There are no 30-minute hops. There are no hour-long hops. In the early days, homebrewers would always say, "No, you don't make it that way,” said Welch. 

“All the hops go in right at the end. And I would have conversations with homebrewers, I'd have correspondence, and they would want to argue with me. I'm sorry, this is the way we make it. ‘But you can't get 25 IBUs with no bittering hops.’ Well, actually you can. But, I've told you how we do it, you can make your own beer,” said Welch.

The first two summers they were open, Kiwanda was a seasonal beer. And by the end of that second summer, it was outselling their American wheat, described as their year-round lighter beer. “It was outselling head to head. And that pleased me to no end because I had been itching to make the pitch to Jeff and Mary (Ed note: Jeff Schons, co-owner and VP and Mary Jones, co-owner and president) that we needed to flip flop these, and Kiwanda needed to be year-round. And we can just run the wheat beer in the summer. And so, that's basically how it ended up in the year-round line-up,” said Welch.

Kiwanda continues to be a favorite and Pelican continues to grow. Since they became a production brewery in 2013, they’ve always focused on “growing organically, taking care of local markets, and focusing on that both from the beer side and also from the brewery rep support side of it,” said Jeff Prinzing, Pelican’s CEO. 

“We continue to see great growth year over year.  And we work hard on staying ahead of that growth curve and try to think into the future, and building our capacity ahead of that growth curve. We've done that with our packaging lines through the years, we added a bigger bottling line back in 2016. We added a canning line in 2018. And we just outgrew our original 30 barrel brewhouse this last year, and put in a 90 barrel brewhouse that’ll carry us into the future,” added Prinzing. “It'll probably be a couple of years before we seriously consider going to any larger markets. We want to really make sure we do a great job and take care of home first before we start expanding,” he adds. 

“We've done everything we could to keep it (Kiwanda) the way we like it,” adds Welch. 

Behind the numbers:

2020 Volume Produced: 6,009bbls

2019 Volume Produced: 5,105bbls

Batch sizing has changed a couple times over the years:

1996-2013: Batch sizes were 15bbls (Pacific City)

2013-2020: Batch sizes were 30bbls (Tillamook facility opens)

2021+: Batch sizes are now 90bbls (Tillamook with new brewhouse)