I ventured out on a road trip from Seattle and spent a few nights in the tiny coastal town of Pacific City, Oregon. Of the few shops located on the beach side of the river, one is the Pelican Brewing Company. It overlooks the beach and the Chief Kiwanda sea stack, served an elevated menu of vacation appropriate food, and has a wide selection of craft beers. While I never ate at the restaurant, I was pretty excited to discover that they also have a few craft sodas in their line-up as well. I picked up a four pack of each flavor at the Cape Kiwanda Market across the street.

A Brief History

Pelican Brewing Company was founded in 1996. While they started in Pacific City, they’ve expanded to have brewpubs or taprooms in five cities along the Oregon coast. Over the years they’ve won quite a few awards and widened distribution of their products around the Pacific Northwest.

The views from their pubs are spectacular, and they highlight the unique shapes of the iconic seas stacks iconic from each city in their branding. They even run a webcam overlooking Pacific City Beach where you can watch the Dory boats come and go throughout the day. What a cool operation!

The Sodas

Pelican offers three sodas, and I got my hands on all of them. There’s a Root Beer, a Cream Soda, and a Marionberry Soda. They were all pretty great, and I’ll review each one separately below.

Pelican Root Beer

This root beer is assertive. It leans hard into the sassafras body and comes across as a little bitter, offset just enough by the natural sugar. There’s also a bit of sharpness from ginger, and caramel notes as well. Their website claims that there’s vanilla in it, but that was one of the more subtle notes that I picked up. I could be imagining things, but I could have sworn I tasted wintergreen in the mix as well. Regardless, this is a root beer for people that like a bold root beer, and it was really tasty with a scoop of Tillamook vanilla ice cream. Interesting trivia, they first made the root beer in 1998, so two years after the brewery was founded.

Pelican Cream Soda

It takes a lot for a cream soda to impress me, and this one did. They’re usually just one note. Vanilla. The end. The Pelican Cream Soda is smooth and creamy, but in the way that cream sodas as creamy without actually containing cream. For whatever reason our brains are conditioned to think “cream” when we taste vanilla…I think it’s over 100 years of marketing from flavor scientists (blog post for another day). What sets Pelican’s cream soda apart is that it’s not just one note of vanilla, it’s a chord. There’s a floral element on top of the creamy body, and almost a sharpness to it as well. Despite having the same amount of sugar as the root beer (about 41 grams), it tastes much sweeter and I would drink it as a dessert.

Pelican Marionberry Soda

You don’t see a lot of Marionberry sodas on the market, but it’s a flavor I really appreciate. Marionberries are a type of blackberry developed at Oregon State University back in the 1950s and has remained a predominantly Oregon based crop. Pelican dialed back the sweetness on this one (about 25% less sugar than the cream soda), so it tastes quite a bit lighter and mature. You still get a tart sweetness from the berries, but it’s not as coating and would pair well with a meal. If you like a drier soda, then Pelican Marionberry Soda is the one to get.

Recap

All three of these Pelican Brewing Company sodas were fantastic and I’d recommend all of them. I checked Pelican’s location finder, and it looks like I can purchase cans of these sodas at a few stores around the Seattle area. If you try them, I’d love to hear what you think. Also, you can watch a quick video I put together of our road trip. Stopping at the Tillamook factory for a butter dipped ice cream cone was a big highlight, but hiking the massive sand dune at the north end of Pacific City Beach is a must-do.