Meet the Avery Rascal — Steve Wadzinski
We all have a little Rascal in us. A monthly feature of who makes Avery, Avery.
This month’s Rascal is Steve “Wad” Wadzinski, Plant Engineer at Avery Brewing Co.
What do you do at Avery?
I’m the plant engineer at Avery Brewing Company. I maintain all of the equipment in the building and I have a crew of guys that help me do that. The team is seven. We have four guys that work specifically on packaging equipment and cover most of the production equipment. We have two guys that work on the facilities and then we have a guy that’s in IT. If it runs, we maintain it and fix it. Recently, we were working on a heater for the kitchen, we worked on a labeler for the bottles, and we’re working on a float for the glycol system. [Packaging] is probably the area that’s the most variable, in that we have equipment that needs to be tuned to different sized packages. They’re temperamental and need to be understood well, so our group is chartered with understanding it best and then training the packaging technicians that have less experience in mechanical, electrical, air-powered, and hydraulic things. Our goal is to understand things and get the day-to-day users understanding the equipment as well as they can.
How long have you been working at Avery?
I’ve been here for close to sixteen years at this point. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering, from University of Wisconsin, Platteville. It’s a large engineering and mining school. Mostly an engineering school, about four male students to every female student. I started out as a mechanical engineer in the meat-packing industry and did about eleven years there. In the meantime, I was homebrewing. At one point, I decided, “You know what, I should get into the brewing industry. I’m not enjoying every day in the meat-packing industry.” I quit engineering and became a brewer at Oasis Brewing [in Boulder]. By the time I left there, I was the plant manager, plant engineer, and head brewer. I came to Avery and was still thinking I’d like to be a brewer. At the time, it was four of us. At some point, they realized I was the guy who knew how to fix things the best, so I got off the brewstand and moved to full-time maintenance. That grew to me hiring a guy probably six years ago, and then I ended up with two guys. As things grew and we ended up with a new facility, we ended up with facilities people and IT people and that’s where I am now!
What brought you to Colorado and Avery?
I’m originally from Lacrosse, Wisconsin. My background and appreciation of beer started early. Lacrosse had G. Heileman Brewing Company which was the fourth-largest brewery in the United States at one point. They had a strategy of buying up smaller, regional breweries and putting them into the whole. They had grown through purchasing other breweries at a time when there was consolidation. I started collecting beer cans when I was probably twelve and I always had an interest in beer. But I graduated in ’85 and Heileman had been purchased by an Australian investment company than ran them into the ground. It didn’t seem like there was a career in beer for anybody then. But the craft industry was starting at the time and in 1991 I had already been homebrewing for a few years. I visited my brother in California and went to the California Festival of Beers. At the time, there were forty or fifty breweries in California already. That was an eye-opener. Six years later, I quit my engineering job to jump into beer. I also found out about Great American Beer Festival, so we came to Colorado for that in ’91, ’92, ’94. We managed to make our way up to Boulder every time. At the time, Boulder Beer was one of the few local breweries you could visit. When I decided to quit engineering, I went to Siebel Brewing School in Chicago in the summer of 1997. We like Boulder so I thought my best strategy was to go up to the Front Range in Colorado. My wife was receptive to that, so I came out here and dropped off fifty resumes, but didn’t get much of a response. I visited Oasis and the guy thought I was crazy. “You’ve got a mechanical engineering job? We’re hiring if you want to work for seven dollars an hour!” He actually said six-fifty, but I said, “Make it seven and I’ll take it.” Ultimately, I didn’t expect to move to Boulder, but I expected to move somewhere on the Front Range and we landed here.
What have been your biggest moments from your time at Avery?
Our bottling line was one of the biggest improvements. We had been running two machines side-by-side. It probably quadrupled the speed of packaging, so packaging went from four and a half days of bottling as much and as fast as we could, to bottling three days a week for six hours. For the first four years, I was probably part of the packaging line as much as I was a brewer. The four of us were brewing on Monday and Tuesday, packaging on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. This allowed us to package enough that we could turn it, like a “batch” system. We would filter what we could package that week and then package it. With the bottling line, we moved to filtering some, bottling some, filtering more later in the week and bottling that. It turned to a system of “filter and package as it’s ready.” Our keg line, the Comac 2T, was another big game-changer. Before, we would wash a hundred kegs, then store a hundred kegs, then fill a hundred kegs. Now, I’ve got some dirty kegs, I feed one on, clean it and fill it. It’s just a flow-through system. The centrifuge was also a huge change in how we did things. We went from a difficult-to-sanitize filtration system to an easy-to-maintain, easily cleanable centrifuge system that drastically increased the quality of the packaged beer.
Moving here dramatically changed things. We went from barely any automation in the brewhouse to almost total automation. We would have to control the temperature of the water with a temperature probe and two valves, a hot and a cold. We would dial those in and the flow rate we wanted, everything was manual. In the new brewery, we have modulating valves. If we want 70 [degrees] C water at a particular flow rate, we can get it. We don’t open up a door on top of the kettle to throw hops in; we put it into a hop-dosing vessel that safely transfers hops into the kettle without ever opening up a boiling vessel. We have a pretty good grasp of the automation, but we have new adventures every time something fails that’s never failed before. Until that happens, we’re naive and end up having to disassemble and discover what we don’t know.
What makes you excited to wake up and come into this brewery every day?
Being self-sufficient in discovering a problem, fixing the problem, resourcing the spare parts. We’ve developed a system of parts management and tool management that allows us to do our job, fix things, without expecting the original manufacturer to hold our hands. I usually have an idea of what I’ll try to work on that day, but frequently the non-critical thing I thought I was going to do gets pushed aside by something critical that happens.
Any good, mischievous stories of the brewery?
We have this phrase called “Wadding.” It developed because I either intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally, got myself filthy, or got someone else filthy, either because of a prank or on accident. If somebody opens up a valve and squirts yeast out at someone else, it would be called “Wadding”. “You got Wadded!” I don’t know how many people would still use that phrase, but Fred [Rizzo, Head Brewer] would know. Drew [Bergum, Engineering Manager] would probably know… Ross [Meinert, Supply Chain Coordinator], Andy [Parker, Chief Barrel Herder]. Definitely Andy.
What is your favorite Avery beer?
I always end up going back to Hog Heaven. It was never a barleywine, it was always kind of a strong, somewhat darker version of what became of the Double IPA. It was dry-hopped way more than any barleywine that I’m aware of. People say they’re not really that into barleywines, but I’d say just drink it! It’s hardly the barleywine that you’re thinking. When the category of Imperial Red came around, I thought,“Finally, that makes sense. That’s what it is.”
What is your favorite non-Avery beer?
Bourbon. Scotch. My favorites are Islay and Talisker.
Outside of work, what hobbies do you have?
I’m a guardian of a ’70 Dodge Challenger Convertible that I’ve had for 25 years. I have a large vinyl collection. I do woodworking. Working on a deck for a shed. We have a tablesaw and a bandsaw and a bunch of woodworking tools, so my next project is to build a drawer system for storing my albums, like in a record store.
