Here is a 3 foot tall welcome beer I recently did for a customer in the Seattle area.  I was carving a medium bear beer last week and this guy came by asking me to do a carving for a new house he just bought.  He was having a house warming and wanted something at the entrance to welcome guests.  I told him about the Welcome Bears I do and he liked it.  Here it is.  I decided in bear to use a new fur cutting process with a Makita electric chainsaw because my results were a little bit course with the normal saw I normally use.  The results from this particular saw, I found, was more pleasing to the eye.  The result: my Welcome Bear has been transformed into the Waving Welcome Bear.
 jordan@jordancarving.com

Bears was the first thing I started carving when I quit my construction job and starting making chainsaw sculptures in front of my dad’s showroom on the Seward Hwy, south of Anchorage.

How did it get started?

Me and my brother decided to have a beer next to the campfire and I popped the cap off my beer on the ear of one of my carved bears.  It was then that my brother said “you should carve a bear that actually opens a beer bottle.”

We both kind of chuckled about it at first but after thinking about it for a moment my brother did a double take, then said “I’m sure you could find the right bottle opener that would fit on the paw of one of your bears.”

I looked around for a month until I found the perfect silver dollar sized metal piece that would attach to the bear.  A week later I had my first two prototypes sitting out in front of the shop.  They both sold in the first hour!

One of the beer bears was brought back because it did not properly open the bottle, to our surprise. So it was back to the drawing board again…

I then figured out it was the angle in which the metal piece was fixed to the carving. I then changed it to an exactly 25 degree angle to ensure no bottle interference.  No more slivers for the customer!

During the past several years I have gotten away from making beer bears in favor of doing bigger pieces but this year, due to popular demand, I have decided to start emphasizing again what got me started in the beginning. 

 jordan@jordancarving.com
Click Here To See An HD Video Of How I Make Beer Bears and Order Yours Today

I got to give my brother Jason a lot of credit. He came up with the idea years ago. We were just playing around. It was a simple idea. Take a small wood carving of a bear. Then add a bottle opener to it.
Seemed good enough. So the Spring of 2007 I tried it. It was really only originally made as a joke. A party item for me and some friends. First I made some for me and some of my friends. They loved it. One of my friends bought two from me that day for $50.00 a piece. I thought to myself, maybe I should make more…..

So I did. And guess what? People loved them. Before all my other wood carvings there was beer bears. I was selling at least three of these everyday for that whole spring and summer. It gave me the push to get going. A lot of people thought I was going to starve when I started this. Even a guy a knew for 10 years was thinking that. He told me that several weeks ago. I was laughing. I thought I was going to fail to. This was just a little experiment. I thought I was going to try this, have fun, make a little money, and then go back to working for my dad building log homes. But the beer bears sold off like crazy.

It was only after the beer bears I got into other things like benches, moose, eagles, orcas, or any other wood carving. I think its real funny the way life works out sometime. As I’m writing this I’m cracking open a cold New Castle on a beer bear right now.

Jordan Anderson

503-739-2832

www.jordancarving.com

www.beerbears.com