Standing in the Alaskan Brewing Co. taproom, Tom West remembers his days bottling beer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottling line was right here when I started,\u201d West said.<\/p>\n
West, 58, who started at the brewery when he was 26 years old in 1986, was one of the very first employees at the company. He admitted he \u201cbugged\u201d the owners three times a week for a month until they hired him. He is now saying \u201cgoodbye\u201d to the brewery he has watched grow from a microbrewery at 2,100 barrels a year to an award-winning regional brewery that produces 150,000 barrels a year.<\/p>\n
West retired Friday after spending 31 years at the brewery in whose success his hands \u2014 and a tree from his yard \u2014 have played major roles.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe used an alder tree from my yard when we first came up with the idea of doing the Smoked Porter,\u201d West said.<\/p>\n
That tree was cut up with a chainsaw lubricated with olive oil \u2014 to avoid chemicals \u2014 and the sawdust was used to smoke the beer, West said. The porter is one of the most highly-awarded beers at the Great American Beer festival and has been a yearly release at the brewery since 1988.<\/p>\n
West\u2019s first position involved using a hacksaw to notch a code on packages. After that, he spent time as a brewer until the early 1990s. He retired working in the brewery\u2019s logistics department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only thing I haven\u2019t done is accounting,\u201d West said.<\/p>\n
Having worked in nearly every part of the company, West said brewing has always been his favorite position.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always preferred doing the brewing by hand,\u201d West said. \u201cThat is true brewing to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is also a sense of pride when you brew, West said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you come home and you have a beer with friends and family, you get to say \u2018I brewed that,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cPeople always thought it was the coolest job.\u201d<\/p>\n
West has seen many different beers come and go, but his favorite shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has to be the Amber Ale,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I first started here, they asked me what my favorite beer was. Back then it was Bass beer. When I took a sip of Amber, it tasted similar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retirement, West said, will allow his wife Shannon and him to spend a few more months at their house in Mexico.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe bought that house because of working here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Darin Jensen, West\u2019s co-worker of for more than 20 years, said he will be missed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is one of the nicest guys I have ever met,\u201d said Jensen, a marketing specialist. \u201cI\u2019ve learned a lot from him. Tom is a real legend here.\u201d<\/p>\n
West said working at the brewery has always been a lot of fun, even when the joke was on him. A few of his co-workers once teamed up for an April Fool\u2019s joke at West\u2019s expense. West was unable to attend a dinner with the brew-crew one evening. Because of that, they devised quite the prank. West had loaded a container and sent it off to the barge. The barge company \u2014 who played along with the prank \u2014 informed the brewery that a cable was severed and the container floated out into the water because of the way West sent it out. The barge company even faxed over insurance papers to West.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in a panic,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was not until later in the day I found out it was a joke.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pranks aside, West said leaving will be tough.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think I could have done this in the fall and sat around all winter,\u201d he said. \u201cI can boat and work on my greenhouse in the summer. It is going to be different. That\u2019s for sure. It\u2019s been a real hoot.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact reporter Gregory Philson at gphilson@juneauempire.com or call at 523-2265. Follow him on Twitter at @GTPhilson.<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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Standing in the Alaskan Brewing Co. taproom, Tom West remembers his days bottling beer. \u201cThe bottling line was right here when I started,\u201d West said. West, 58, who started at the brewery when he was 26 years old in 1986, was one of the very first employees at the company. He admitted he \u201cbugged\u201d the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":431,"featured_media":33589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/431"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33588"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}