A German-run brewery in a Pacific port.

Pacífico comes from Mazatlán, the port on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Grupo Modelo, which owns the brewery today, dates the opening of the Compañía Cervecera del Pacífico in Mazatlán to 14 March 1900, and the beer’s US website says that in 1900 “three German brewers” established the Cervecería del Pacífico in what it calls a small Mexican port town. English Wikipedia names the three Germans as Jorge Claussen, Germán Evers and Emilio Radostits.

The beer’s full name is Cerveza Pacífico Clara. “Pacífico” refers to the ocean the brewery faces, and “clara” describes a light-coloured beer, as opposed to an “oscura,” or dark one, English Wikipedia explains. It describes Pacífico Clara as a pilsner-style lager, and the brand’s American importer calls it a “pilsner-style lager” too. Constellation’s website says word of it spread from Sinaloa and up the Baja California coast.

The brewery remained a separate company for half a century. In 1954 it was bought by Cervecería Modelo of Mexico City, the brewer of Corona and Modelo, which bought La Estrella of Guadalajara in the same year, Spanish Wikipedia says. Spanish Wikipedia counts Mazatlán as the group’s second brewery after Mexico City, and says a new Guadalajara plant, whose construction Antonino Fernández Rodríguez coordinated in 1958, was the third. Grupo Modelo still lists the Compañía Cervecera del Pacífico in Mazatlán among its breweries.

A lighthouse, a lifebuoy and a surfers’ legend.

The Pacífico label looks back at its home port. English Wikipedia, citing the beer site BeerAdvocate, describes it as a lifebuoy encircling a ship’s anchor, set over the hill that carries the port’s lighthouse, known locally as the Cerro del Crestón. Wikipedia’s article on Grupo Modelo describes the same scene as the city’s famous lighthouse surrounded by a ring buoy.

The lighthouse is a landmark in its own right. Spanish Wikipedia’s article on Mazatlán says El Crestón, at the western end of the outer bay, was first used for marine signals in 1828, that building work on the lighthouse began in 1892, and that works begun in 1930 joined what had been an island to the rest of the port.

Size names carry local colour too. In Mazatlán, English Wikipedia says, the beer comes in small bottles called “cuartitos,” standard “medias” and large “ballenas,” or whales. Grupo Modelo added a light version, Pacífico Light, in 2008, and in the United States Constellation now sells a Citrus Agave Lager under the Pacífico name alongside the original Clara.

North of the border, the brand’s story is told through surfing. Constellation’s Pacífico website, under the line “Found In Baja. Imported By Surfers.,” says that in the early 1970s, “as the story goes,” a group of California surfers driving south in a van found the beer in Baja California, loaded a few cases into the van and took them home, becoming its first importers, and that the beer then gained a following among surfers in Southern California. Its website today also promotes merchandise, outdoor adventures and a “Snow League,” and signs off with the line “Adventure Responsibly.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Mexican beer brands: Modelo, Pacifico, Dos Equis, Victoria, Bohemia, Indio and Carta Blanca. Mexican beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that began at a single regional brewery to names that now belong to much larger international brewing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a label, a name and the bottle or can it comes in, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Mazatlán brewery to two multinational owners.

Pacífico followed its parent through the consolidation of the beer industry. Grupo Modelo listed on the Mexican stock exchange in 1994, and from January 2007 its export beers, Pacífico among them, were imported to the United States by Crown Imports, a joint venture with Constellation Brands, Spanish Wikipedia says. In June 2012 Anheuser-Busch InBev, which already held half of Grupo Modelo, announced that it would buy the rest; after a US Department of Justice antitrust suit was settled, the merger was completed in June 2013, the St. Louis Business Journal reported.

To satisfy the Justice Department, AB InBev transferred the US rights to Pacífico and Grupo Modelo’s other brands to Constellation, English Wikipedia says, citing the St. Louis Business Journal and Supermarket News. Pacífico therefore has two owners today: Grupo Modelo, part of AB InBev, outside the United States, and Constellation inside it. Its US website describes the beer as Pacifico Clara, “Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL,” Constellation’s beer importer. Constellation brews its Mexican beers for the American market at breweries in Nava, Coahuila, and Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, English Wikipedia says, while Grupo Modelo supplies the rest of the world.

English Wikipedia names Pacífico, with Corona and Modelo, among Grupo Modelo’s export brands, and Spanish Wikipedia includes it in the group of export beers that Grupo Modelo sells in more than 180 countries. Constellation’s September 2025 press release on the Modelo centenary named Pacífico, alongside Corona and Modelo, as part of the beer portfolio it sells in the United States.

For a design guide, Pacífico shows how a regional beer can build a whole identity from its home port, from the lighthouse on its label to a surf story told by its importer. Compare Modelo, the Mexico City brewery that bought it in 1954, and Victoria, the Toluca lager Modelo bought in 1935. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a bright yellow and a buoy red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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