This is me in a hairnet chopping up pumpkin, with the encouragement of Illawarra Brewing Company brewer Shaun Blissett. Who will be happy I spelt his name correctly.

Beer can make you do some things you might not normally do.

It can make you decide that a kebab is an excellent choice for dinner. It can trick you into thinking you’re a good dancer – or at least not care that you’re a terrible one. And, during a work function, it can make you think telling your boss he’s a knob is a great idea.

It can also make you cut up pumpkins.

Okay, I should explain. Each year around this time, the Illawarra Brewing Company makes a pumpkin beer – Smashing Rumpkin. And each year it involves the brewers having to hack up kilos and kilos of pumpkin.

But this year was different. This year they put a call out on Facebook, saying they were brewing it yesterday and were looking for help in chopping up all that Jap pumpkin.

Right, if you just asked me ‘‘hey, I want you to cut up this pumpkin for me’’, I’d say no. Unless you were my wife, in that case I would say ‘‘yes’’.

But if you said ‘‘hey, I want you to cut up this pumpkin for me. It’s for beer’’, I’d say ‘‘yeah, sure. I’ll cut up two!’’. And why? Because beer is involved.

There is the added bonus of getting my name on the tap decal. All the cutters wrote their name in a big square on a blackboard and they take a picture of that then somehow turn it into a tap decal. I don’t know how they do that – but it sounds cool.
And then there’s an invite to the first tapping of the beer, so that’s pretty cool too.

But I didn’t really know any of that when I rocked up to cut pumpkin. I did it because of beer.