Well, unless you’re Tim Thomas from Nowra's HopDog BeerWorks and you’re making a beer for the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular (aka GABS).

The festival, which started in a bar in Melbourne in 2011 and now travels to Sydney and Auckland, features a central component where brewers bring a beer they’ve never made before.

That tends to lead to some brewers looking to create something very unusual – on this year’s list of around 170 new beers there’s one based on a Fruit Tingle, another on a mango milkshake and various ingredients including red licorice, pretzels, cookies, cucumber, Earl Grey tea, chestnuts and bone marrow.

And, of course, fairy floss, rosewater and popcorn.

Called Pandapoppinfairyturkishfloss, HopDog’s beer is Belgian-style stout with Turkish delight flavours (rosewater is a key ingredient in Turkish delight).

Thomas is known for brewing with weird ingredients – Redskin lollies, skull candy, pumpkins and apple juice – but finding the items needed for this latest beer was a challenge.

Especially when it came to finding a way to get 20 kilograms of sugar turned into fairy floss.

“I contacted some of the sideshow people locally, trying to get them to give me a price on them coming to the brewery and making me some fairy floss until I said ‘stop’,” Thomas said.

One never returned his call and the other couldn't get her head around what he wanted to do.

So in the end he bought some pre-prepared fairy floss. A lot of pre-prepared fairy floss.

“I went to Southern Sweets, which is a local lolly shop, and bought five kilos of fairy floss, which is a stack of boxes taller than me,” he says.

"It’s a lot of fairy floss, especially when it comes in 65 gram bags and you have to unbag it and throw it in the kettle.”

The beer isn't ready yet but Thomas did make a small batch to see how it would work out and says that tasted lovely.

Though he admits he was lucky he caught his miscalculation for the amount of rosewater he’d need before it was too late.

“My bad maths on the day that I did my calculations said it was going to be five litres of rosewater in 800 litres of beer,” he says.

“Then I rechecked my maths and found out I only need a half-litre of rosewater. So people would have been crying if I’d put the whole five litres in there.”

Thomas has made a beer for GABS every year since 2012, when the festival moved from the Local Taphouses in Melbourne and Sydney to the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton.

That was also the year co-founders Guy Greenstone and Steve Jeffares bit off way more than they could chew, copped a hammering on social media (mainly due to really long queues) and lost a stack of money.

Greenstone says he remembers finding Jeffares lying on the floor in a quiet part of the festival, staring at the ceiling and asking, “My God, what have we done?”.

There was a real chance GABS could have ended right there.

“We had some pretty serious conversations afterwards when we realised how much money we’d lost,” Greenstone says.

“We knew we could do it better but we didn’t know whether we had the balls to get up and go again.

“We looked at each other and said ‘yeah, we’re ready to go again. We can do a better job’.

“Then we had to convince our wives.”

The wives obviously said yes, and Greenstone and Jeffares ironed out the kinks and the festival kept getting bigger.

In 2016 it headed over the border for a day in Sydney and across the ditch for a day in Auckland as well.

In the process it was ranked as "one of the best beer festivals in the world” by the US-based Beer Connoisseur magazine.

Greenstone says GABS is “Disneyland” for a beer fan but reckons it’s not just for beer lovers.

“Beer is the champion and it’s always front and centre and is the thing that we love and that we’re incredibly passionate about,” he says.

“But we’re also passionate about the experience altogether. So it’s a bit of a diversified experience – if you’re not a beer lover, you can still go to GABS and have a great time.

“There’s amazing entertainment, there’s great food, great cider, there are roaming bands that walk around and pump up the crowd.

“It’s just a great atmosphere.”

And one in which there seems to be few if any issues with drunkenness that occur at other venues where so much beer is present.

Greenstone says staff will have quiet words with people, suggesting it might be time to slow down and drink some water.

There have been the odd ejection, he says, but the event has created its own culture where getting plastered and misbehaving isn’t the go.

“It’s a culture that has developed and there’s a lot of repeat visits,” he says.

“Each year we do these surveys and each year 50 per cent of the people have been the year before.

“So I think the DNA of that culture endures from year to year.”

GABS is on at the Sydney Showground on May 27. More details here.