You're not supposed to start drinking beer until noon, so making it as the sun's coming up just feels weird.

Yet, here I am at HopDog BeerWorks in Nowra at 6am with brewer and co-owner Tim Thomas.

After stints brewing at Sydney's Lord Nelson and the Five Islands Brewery (now Illawarra Brewing Company) Thomas and his wife Therese decided to open their own brewery in Nowra.

That was in August 2011 and, after a nervous first few months, the brewery has developed a strong following among beer geeks for its left-of-centre approach.

Among the releases to date is a rum barrel-aged raspberry wheat beer called Red Rum, Steinpunk, a beer brewed with the help of white-hot rocks and a 10.5 per cent barley wine called Super Beast they make to celebrate each anniversary of the brewery.

And almost all of those beers were started at 6am.

"We start early so we can finish early," Thomas explains.

He and Therese are the brewery's only employees, so apart from making the beer, they have to answer phones, serve customers, guide brewery tours, bottle beer (each HopDog beer is bottled, labelled and capped by hand), label and package, make deliveries and other assorted tasks.

This morning's brew is the 351st for HopDog - the Alluvial Peach. It's a wheat beer stored in oak barrels with a load of peaches (yes, the pits are removed first).

At this point a brief brewing lesson may be helpful. Beer has four key ingredients - water, malt, hops and yeast - and they are added in that order.

The first thing Thomas does is heat up 200 litres of water (or "hot liquor"). While that's heating up, he mills 50kg of malted barley and wheat, cracking open the grains.

This allows access to the sugars in the grain that become alcohol.

The grain then goes into the mash tun, and while we wait for the water to reach 78 degrees, Thomas uses a computer program to "make" his beer.

He enters all the ingredients in the correct measurements and the program will calculate things like the beer's expected bitterness levels, the alcohol content and the expected starting and finishing gravities (these are measures that are used to calculate when a beer's finished fermenting).

If the predicted alcohol is too high, or the beer seems too bitter, then it's just a matter of adjusting the quantity of the ingredients to hit the desired marks.

The computer program also gives Thomas a good idea of how tasty the beer will be.

"I can taste what the beer is going to be like just from the laptop," he says.

Once the water reaches the right temperature, it is pumped into the mash tun (which is basically a 200-litre pot) and left to sit for at least 45 minutes. Known as mashing, this process draws out the sugars from the grain which, once the grain is filtered out, leaves us with a sweet liquid called wort.

The process also leaves us with 45 minutes with not much to do.

"There's always a lot of standing around in the brewing industry," Thomas says.

He adds that people sometimes seem disappointed when they visit the brewery, because it's not as exciting as they expect. They think beer is great and assume the place it's made must be just as great.

Breweries are not some magical Willy Wonka-type place where Oompa Loompas cart ingredients from one place to the next, while singing some infernally catchy ditty. It's usually just a few guys in gumboots.

HopDog is one of the smallest breweries in the country - able to brew just 200 litres at a time, which equates to about 600 bottles.

That limited capacity has helped with HopDog's profile - geeks rush to buy a new beer and, before you know it, it's all gone. And nothing breeds desirability like scarcity.

After 45 minutes, the mash is finished and the wort is transferred into the boil kettle. The 45kg of grain is left behind for me to shovel out while Thomas calls a local farmer to come and pick it up - he uses it to feed his cows.

The flame is turned on under the boil kettle, I throw in some hops and the process of making beer continues for another hour. Finally it goes into a fermenter.

That's where the yeast begins to turn the wort into beer. The yeast eats the sugars captured from the grain and turns them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. It's a process that tends to take a week or two.

As brewers are wont to say, "we don't make beer, the yeast does".

And so with the yeast taking over the work of making the beer, I figure it's a good enough time for me to finish up for the day.

Starting work at 6am will do that to you. Though I do have the urge to have a beer or two when I get home.