Standing in the Alaskan Brewing Co. taproom, Tom West remembers his days bottling beer.
“The bottling line was right here when I started,” 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 “bugged” the owners three times a week for a month until they hired him. He is now saying “goodbye” 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.
West retired Friday after spending 31 years at the brewery in whose success his hands — and a tree from his yard — have played major roles.
“We used an alder tree from my yard when we first came up with the idea of doing the Smoked Porter,” West said.
That tree was cut up with a chainsaw lubricated with olive oil — to avoid chemicals — 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.
West’s 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’s logistics department.
“The only thing I haven’t done is accounting,” West said.
Having worked in nearly every part of the company, West said brewing has always been his favorite position.
“I always preferred doing the brewing by hand,” West said. “That is true brewing to me.”
There is also a sense of pride when you brew, West said.
“When you come home and you have a beer with friends and family, you get to say ‘I brewed that,’” he said. “People always thought it was the coolest job.”
West has seen many different beers come and go, but his favorite shouldn’t surprise anyone.
“It has to be the Amber Ale,” he said. “When 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.”
Retirement, West said, will allow his wife Shannon and him to spend a few more months at their house in Mexico.
“We bought that house because of working here,” he said.
Darin Jensen, West’s co-worker of for more than 20 years, said he will be missed.
“He is one of the nicest guys I have ever met,” said Jensen, a marketing specialist. “I’ve learned a lot from him. Tom is a real legend here.”
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’s joke at West’s 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 — who played along with the prank — 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.
“I was in a panic,” he said. “It was not until later in the day I found out it was a joke.”
Pranks aside, West said leaving will be tough.
“I don’t think I could have done this in the fall and sat around all winter,” he said. “I can boat and work on my greenhouse in the summer. It is going to be different. That’s for sure. It’s been a real hoot.”
• Contact reporter Gregory Philson at gphilson@juneauempire.com or call at 523-2265. Follow him on Twitter at @GTPhilson.
