Last Wednesday we did something unusual for the middle of the week: my wife and I drove over to Cannon Beach on Oregon’s north coast to visit Public Coast Brewing and attend an overnight “Beer Retreat” at the nearby Surfsand Resort, with dinner at the Wayfarer Restaurant. In the interest of full disclosure, I will point out right away that this trip was completely free (other than gas and travel expenses), with Public Coast footing the bill for us and other beer media folks; I’ll get into the why in a bit. First, some background.

Public Coast opened two years ago in Cannon Beach, in the former Clark’s Restaurant space (which was the Lumberyard Restaurant before that, so called because it was located in the building that originally housed the Cannon Beach Lumber Company). Owner Ryan Snyder, who moved to the town in 1994, had long wanted to open a brewery ever since “running taps in the back bar of Holy Cow Brewery” in Las Vegas in his early years. (Holy Cow is now known as Big Dog’s Brewing.)

When Snyder married his wife, who grew up in the town, he married into the family business, which included owning and operating not only the Lumberyard/Clark’s, but also the Surfsand, the Stephanie Inn, and the Wayfarer Restaurant. It was while he was managing Clark’s that he decided the location would be a perfect spot for a brewery. He convinced the chef he’d worked with for years, Will Leroux, to learn how to brew beer and take up the mantle of brewer while Snyder renovated the restaurant into a brewpub.

Leroux had never brewed beer before, and what followed was a crash course in homebrewing followed by a stint at Big Dog’s Brewing in Las Vegas (thanks to Snyder’s connections there from the Holy Cow days). Snyder describes Leroux an an “Oregon Renaissance man” (among other things, Leroux is a beekeeper, woodworker, farmer, hunter, fisher, mushroom forager, when he’s not being a chef), and said, “He thought I was crazy!” when it came to becoming a brewer.

For his part, Leroux says, “It’s a cool thing to be able to do.”

Snyder enlisted the (consulting) help of Fred Bowman, founder of Portland Brewing, for advice and help in all aspects of the operation. Ultimately Public Coast opened in May of 2016 and has been seeing continual growth since; the OLCC reports that the brewery sold nearly 700 barrels of beer in 2017, up from 338 in 2016. (OLCC reports are only current through February of this year, with 81 barrels sold.) With a planned expansion taking course over the next several months, they seem to be on an upward curve.

Even so, they are still only a small, two year-old brewery located in a small town on the coast—so what’s this about an all expenses paid media junket for a dozen or so people?

Tourism, of course. Ultimately, it’s all about the tourism. The thing about Cannon Beach is, it’s a tourist resort destination—its entire economy is tourism. Located just off of Highway 101 about 14 miles south of Seaside (another popular tourist town), it’s a major destination for visitors from Portland and Seattle in particular, drawing huge numbers during the high season.

With tourism as the town’s bread and butter, it’s a no-brainer to host a bunch of beer writers for a night out—during the off season, when business is slow and there are vacancies in town. Public Coast Brewing is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which is ideal for hosting a private event, and since Snyder’s family also owns the Surfsand and the Wayfarer, it makes perfect sense to incorporate them into the trip to promote the three properties and fill some rooms. It’s a good strategy.

So let’s talk about the beer and brewing, and where Public Coast is going.

The beers I tasted on draft at the brewery and at dinner at the Wayfarer were all decent-to-pretty-good, though there were some missteps. The first beer I had upon arriving was the Lager 321, and my first impression was “pineapple,” decidedly not something to look for in a lager. It was pungently fruity with pineapple notes, and at first I thought they’d dirtied up a line with the pineapple cider that was also on tap. But no: the lager was throwing off so much sulfur that it smelled, and slightly tasted, like pineapple.

Leroux confirmed this when I asked him about it. This is the first lager he had ever brewed, and he started out the conversation saying it had more sulfur than he would have liked—and also mentioned that he gets pineapple notes from it as well. Everything he described about the process of brewing this beer sounded normal, so it’s possible it was simply kegged too soon, and/or could stand to have the sulfur vented off.

(I’m also just geeky enough to note here that they missed a step in naming this beer — “Lager 321.” One of the points the brewery makes in its branding right away is in the name, honoring the fact that all 363 miles of Oregon’s coastline and beaches are public. Other beers in the stable are named with this branding in mind… so it should have been named Lager 363.)

Aside from the sulfurous lager, other beers on tap were enjoyable. While at the brewery, I also drank Oswald IPA, O! Valencia Hazy IPA, and the American Brown Ale (all these pours were half pints), and tasted the Mango Sour, Coconut Brown Ale, Imperial IPA, NW Red, and the La Barrel Age Blonde. The Oswald was a nice, solid American IPA, the O! Valencia a decent hazy (a style I’m still on the fence about). The Imperial IPA was okay, but not memorable; the Coconut Brown was interesting, as was the NW Red, and the American Brown was a really good example of a style that can get boring quick. The Mango Sour was a pretty standard kettle sour, probably needing some fine-tuning. And, unfortunately, the La Barrel Age Blonde was undrinkable; something went wrong in the barrel and it was highly chlorophenolic.

At the Wayfarer Restaurant that evening, I also had the ’67 Blonde Ale and the Black Stack Stout. The stout was fine if a little on the light side, but the ’67 Blonde Ale deserves a special mention.

Blonde ales, by themselves, are not a terribly exciting category. They are brewed to be easy-drinking and inoffensive, the ale attempt to lure light lager drinkers over to the dark side; they are also light and uncomplicated enough to make it tough to hide flaws. Which can be challenging to brew—much less brew one good enough to win awards. ’67 Blonde Ale is one such beer.

It won the gold medal at the Oregon Beer Awards earlier this year in the “Golden, Blonde, and Light Ales” category, which is a distinctive regional award to win. But! Even more prestigious, and frankly still rather surprising, this beer just picked up the gold medal in the American “Golden or Blonde Ale” category at the World Beer Cup—which I watched live on the internet while this post was in progress. Kudos are definitely in order.

The pint of ’67 I had last week with dinner was a fine beer, clean and drinkable with a noticeable pleasant hop presence at the back. Leroux dry hops the beer with Saaz hops which infuses this pleasant character without going over the top.

All in all, pretty good beers for a first-time brewer with barely two-and-a-half years under his belt. In the interest of full disclosure, we also did end up drinking and bringing home some of the brewery’s canned beers that were not nearly as good as the draft offerings—they were packaged in November of last year, and were stale and oxidized. Hopefully that was just a mixup and not representative of the packaged beers going out to the market. To be fair, Snyder spoke of the cans as merely a marketing tool for the brewery, and would much rather sell the majority of their beer on-premise in Cannon Beach.

Leroux takes a chef’s approach to his beer, relying on his years of experience in the culinary world; indeed, he often spoke of “coming from the chef’s world” in formulating his recipes, and compares his use of hops in beer to cooking with spices and salt and pepper in accenting the finished product.

However he is also bringing direct culinary influences into his brewing as well, which we experienced when entering the small barrel room adjacent to the brewhouse. Leroux has a Candy Cap Mushroom Russian Imperial Stout available which plays the maple syrup sweetness of the mushrooms off of the traditional imperial stout qualities; we didn’t sample that beer directly, but he did pull a bit of imperial stout out of a barrel and infused the samples with candy cap mushroom extract (really, just vodka that had the mushrooms soaking in it).

He plans to infuse a tequila barrel-aged version of that stout with traditional Mexican mole sauce ingredients to produce a mole imperial stout. He poured samples of that tequila stout for the group as well, which I rather preferred to the candy cap version; the tequila notes were noticeable and dried the stout out nicely.

The barrel room, which opened in 2017, is relatively small, holding about two dozen barrels. What doesn’t end up as a specialty pour on tap will find its way into an extremely limited run of bottles, which will only be available at the brewery directly.

Expansion for the brewery is in the works. Snyder plans to eliminate some of the bar space for additional tanks as well as storage. Public Coast currently self-distributes beer to the Portland area, cans and kegs, and closer to home uses Clatsop Distributing locally, to get the beer up and down the north coast. As the brewery adds capacity I would expect to see more on tap (and in cans) around the region—but remember, Snyder’s goal is to sell more on-premise beer, which means bringing more people to Cannon Beach. The tourism full circle.

As for the rest of the Beer Retreat, we had a nice dinner at the Wayfarer—good food, and good company, with excellent views of the sunset—and the Surfsand hosts a beach bonfire each evening, and set up a special bonfire on the beach area just for us in the media group. Coolers of canned beer (which I mentioned earlier) and s’mores were provided, and after an afternoon of enjoying beers and filling up at dinner, we did have a good time around the fire.

The Surfsand Resort was quite nice—they set us up with beachfront suites, which cost around $200 per night in the off season, and $400-600 during peak times (August). Not all of the rooms face the ocean. But no complaints in the lodging; if you can afford it, it would be well worth the stay. (I will admit that the summertime/high season prices are well out of my range though.)

Overall, it was a very enjoyable trip and I’m impressed with what Public Coast is working on. I would have liked to have spent a little bit of time in Cannon Beach the next morning, but we had to leave early to get back to Bend for work. It’s worth the visit, and if you’re looking to visit, the brewery’s Hayday! beer fest is taking place on August 25.