Weird Beard Brew Co is in a state of transition. The Hanwell, West London-based brewery had just bid farewell to its head brewer, Jonny Bright. And with the team a man down during our visit, the brewery was also in the process of bidding adieu to another mainstay. But this time it was by choice.

The company’s popular 5.8% IPA ‘ Hit The Lights’ is being brewed for one last time. A key name since the brewery’s formation, the self-confessed ‘Mixed Up IPA’, which features Aurora and Targett Hops, is being put to bed, for now at least.

“Creativity is key for us, it helps you grow, and it allows you to explore different beer types if you refuse to put up boundaries,” explains Natasha Wolf. Wolf is the sales and marketing coordinator at Weird Beard, although the modest, qualified biochemist, could easily add bottler, brewer and a dozen other responsibilities to her title if she pushed the issue.

Weird Beard’s sales and marketing maestro Natasha Wolf

The brewery’s respected IPA being brewed during the visit is being put on an indefinite hiatus as the result of a reorganisation of Weird Beard’s core range. Though Wolf, as well as co-founders Gregg Irwin and Bryan Spooner, are loathed to refer to their beer offering in such an insular fashion.

“We are at a point where we are putting out quite a few beers, as well as continuing to concentrate on collaborations, which we really enjoy doing. We looked at ‘Hit The Lights’ and came to conclusion that it isn’t really a ‘Weird Beard’ beer. It’s a shame as it’s a really good beer, but as Bryan has said to us before, it is one he wishes ‘someone else had brewed’,” explains Wolf.

It’s by taking decisions such as this that the (at the time of writing) eight-staff brewery has grown from an idea formulated by Irwin and Spooner in London’s venerable Euston Tap pub in 2011, to a profitable business exporting to around 20 different countries across the globe.

The brewery itself, like many others across the UK and Ireland, calls several units in an industrial estate home, with neighbours in the shape of heavy industry and distribution firms. Housed across two units, Weird Beard used to share part of their site with Ellenberg’s Brewery, which ceased trading last year. However the brewery’s founder, Mike Ellenberg is now part of the Weird Beard team, carrying out important maintenance roles on equipment at the Boston Business Park facility.

Weird Beard’s Bryan Spooner in the midst of a busy packaging day

Having someone like Ellenberg on hand at Weird Beard, you assume, is vital for the brewery to continue its successful operation. While there are eight members of the team, the company has a strong ethos of cooperation with each member of the team playing a number of important roles across the whole business. Spooner, for instance, is busy manually bottling some of its next beers for distribution during our conversation.

“There’s no such thing as an average day here. For me, it’s a balance between sales, and communication, which includes the social media side, too. That’s what I was hired to do but that has changed over time. We are lucky that as we have a small team, we make enough beer and we don’t often have to find customers, they often come to us!” says Wolf. But that doesn’t mean that the team rests on its laurels, quite the opposite.

Irwin explains that the team could be at an event spreading the Weird Beard name, pretty much most days in July and August. And when you look at the brewery’s calendar, you start to think that they’ve actually committed to each and everyone of those anyway. In the weeks following our trip, Weird Beard was among the hundreds of breweries in attendance at the latest Great British Beer Festival.

Elsewhere, it had a successful showing at the London Craft Beer Festival, not to mention a well-attended ‘Meet The Brewer’ and tap takeover event at BrewDog Camden, a new beer launch with beer writer Matt Curtis, as well as a whisky and beer pairing evening organised by Wolf as part of the excellent London Beer City week of events. And these are just a few of its London-based commitments. If we were to discuss its national and international focus we would need the rest of this very magazine.

Among the other new beers showcased by Weird Beard during August was its brand-new IPA, ‘Defacer’. For the outfit’s 200th brew, it didn’t take long for the team’s collective love of Sorachi Ace to once again come to the fore.  Following on from its popular 8.1% ‘Sorachi Face Plant’ double IPA, ‘Defacer’ is a heavyweight 11.1% triple IPA, but opting to brew such a beer wasn’t always a clear-cut decision.

“When brewing Defacer, we were aware that there was a trend with a great deal of breweries doing triple IPAs so for us, moving into that space was something we deliberated on for some time,” explains Wolf. “We are big fans of the triple IPAs put out by breweries such as Pressure Drop, Siren and Magic Rock so we tried a lot and asked what we liked from these beers, and also what we wanted to safeguard against. We had a fear that by doing something extreme, you’re always running a risk that you may not get what you want out of the beer. You have to be careful.”

She adds: “In this industry other great beers inspire you, and you learn from them. It’s not a case for wanting to brew a beer that is “better” than the alternatives on the market as it’s not that type of industry, it’s about brewing one that you are truly happy with.”

Thankfully Weird Beard, and drinkers alike are truly happy with ‘Defacer’.

But while Weird Beard continues to experiment with new beer styles, Wolf is keen to point out a less attractive side of the modern beer drinker.

She explains: “People can also be quite fickle. It’s like music, when something is indie, people think it’s automatically great but when it becomes mainstream, people switch off regardless of whether is a good or bad album, or in our industry, a good or a bad beer.

“And that’s something people should be aware of in this industry.  There is always excitement of the new kids but there is also a prestige of reliability surrounding tried, and proven breweries. Everyone starts from somewhere, and you then hopefully you can grow and diversify.

“There is always something you can improve and that’s why the good breweries succeed as they are committed to improvement, change, and to challenging themselves.”

And if that is the case, then Weird Beard will be around for a long time yet.