BP: How much of your total output is Pumpkin?

DW: About 20% of our production for the entire year.

BP: Is there a point where that becomes disruptive to your overall brew schedule or impacts your portfolio?

DW: It’s gotten to the point where it’s bordering on disruptive because of having to make all the other year-round styles and not wanting to run out of them. So we decided that next year we’re only going to allow Pumpkin to grow 25%. It’s such a huge amount we do now, that if we don’t sort of trim the growth that it will be really difficult to manage and still have our year-round beers stocked.

BP: Is there the potential to marry Pumpkin with your barrel or sour projects, or would that add to the disruption?

DW: Yes, it will add to the problem. They did a small amount (of Pumpkin) last year, aged in bourbon barrels. I think we did three or four barrels and then we kegged it in sixtels and used them for special events and things. But yeah, nobody was in favor of doing that on a large basis, just a very limited basis like that for fun. It’s also – it’s a tough beer to brew. We use an enormous amount of pumpkin.

BP: How does Weyerbacher interact with the online beer community?

DW: We’ve sort of got a light handed approach at this time. I first got interested in BeerAdvocate and RateBeer ten years ago when the internet was becoming substantial. And I don’t think I knew about BeerAdvocate the first five years they were out. And then I started to hear a little more about it. And I liked the conversations going on the threads. And that was fascinating to me. So at some point in the mid 2000’s, I started following Beer Advocate pretty heavily. I’d go on a daily basis going on and looking for posts, looking for anything related to Weyerbacher. Somebody had a question, you know, I would do these searches every day to see what was going on. I feel it gave us good feedback during what was still a formative period for us. So getting that feedback was really helpful to me and seeing how people talked about it honestly. When you’re face to face with someone doing a sample, you don’t always get the truth.
A lot of times you got polite answers so you don’t really know.

But on BeerAdvocate, boy you get the unvarnished truth. But we always looked at it as you can learn from the negative feedback as well to improve your quality, improve your recipes, make things better. And that’s the way we took it. And I think it really did help us make us a better brewery. So yeah, in a sense, it became a massive awareness campaign for the whole industry. I think it’s a great thing that’s been done. And as you guys have there’s more and more sites popping up and getting established and developing a good following so it’s all good. I’d like to have a full time person who does handle social media and PR functions and marketing, and we will. We may be only a year or two away from that but we’ve decided we had to buy more equipment first.

Chris Ferullo loves craft beer. An IT business analyst by day, he moonlights as a hophead and proponent of the Philly beer scene. Ferullo practiced journalism in college and is the first writer to join the BeerPulse team.

Follow @chrisferullo