Ashur Hall, left, and Shaun Blissett from the Illawarra Brewing Company. Picture: DAVE TEASE
Pumpkin beer might seem a bit odd to many but the punters at the Illawarra Brewery just love it.
For the past five years the Illawarra Brewing Company has made a pumpkin beer, with brewers Ashur Hall and Shaun Blissett in charge for the last three.
This year's brew - called Smashing Rumpkin because it's been aged in 20-year-old rum barrels - is due on tap later this week. Mr Hall said their pumpkin beers had proved to be quite a hit with drinkers.
"It's a bit of a surprise because in my mind I would think people might be a bit shocked by the idea of throwing pumpkin in a beer," he said.
"But it's turned out to be a bit of a novelty and people are willing to give it a go.
"When they taste it they realise it's not like eating roast pumpkin, it's more like the sweet and spicy flavours you get out of a pumpkin pie."
The idea of pumpkin beer comes from the United States, which tends to get a bit pumpkin-happy around this time of year, thanks to Halloween.
Mr Hall had a US connection that helped him and Mr Blissett develop the beer - his mother is an American who would make pumpkin pie each year and throw in a selection of spices.
"We originally rang up mum and asked 'what do you use? What sort of quantities?' and we basically scaled it up from there to a scale of 1200 litres," Mr Hall said.
"Over the last few years we've stepped up that spice and that pumpkin addition, so every year we're trying to make it bigger than the previous year."
The main ingredient is, of course, pumpkin - 40 kilograms of Jap pumpkin in fact. And it was the kitchen staff at the brewery who had to cut all that up and roast it.
"We rang up the kitchen in the bar the day before we were making it and said, 'Can you get 40kg of pumpkin for us?' " Mr Hall said. They said yes.
"So we had all the kitchen hands chopping pumpkin all afternoon and roasting it."