Brewmaster Greg Fleehart likes to keep it simple.

“I’d rather make a simple, quote ‘boring’ beer and make it as drinkable as I can, versus making a mediocre beer and putting a bunch of stuff in there to make it taste OK,” said Fleehart, 28, who plies his craft for Northwest Brewing Company. “I’d rather focus on quality and the process.”

As the man in charge of the Pacific-based microbrewery’s beer formulation and production, Fleehart is usually happy fine-tuning the company’s more traditional offerings – including its flagship Hoppy Bitch IPA, Jetstream Lager and his own recipe, Three Skulls.

Every once in a while though, Fleehart admits, he likes to experiment.

“It’s OK to do (flavored, crazy beers) every once in a while to get energized,” Fleehart said.

This Sunday beer aficionados get the chance to sample a couple of the brewery’s beers at the annual Hops and Crops Festival at Mary Olson Farm in Auburn.

Among the beers on tap from the Northwest will be the company’s seasonal pumpkin beer.

“It was a fun beer to brew,” Fleehart said. “We actually went overboard on some of the silly stuff.”

Fleehart explained that he roasted two organic red pumpkins for the brew, adding cinnamon and sugar to the mash. Then he roasted the seeds and milled them into the mix.

“Then I baked a couple of pumpkin pies — just the filling without the milk or anything like that — and added that” he said. “We just had a lot of fun with it. I drank a whole pint right out of the tank. It was gone before I knew it, so I knew we had a pretty good beer.”

And Fleehart knows beer.

Fleehart began brewing not long after graduating from Gonzaga University in 2007 with a degree in business administration and marketing.

While in Spokane, Fleehart said, he was turned on to the flavor potential of craft beer during a trip to local microbrew Northing Lights Brewing Company (now NoLi Brewing).

“I went there and tasted a 13th anniversary Imperial IPA, and it blew my head off,” he said. “It was so much flavor in a beer, and I had no idea a beer could taste that way. I could barely handle it, because I was a novice. But I was really intrigued.”

After relocating to the Puget Sound region, Fleehart parlayed his curiosity into a trip to Gallaghers’ Where U Brew, where he formulated his first beer, a nut-brown ale.

“It turned out really great,” he said. “While I was doing it, I realized that was what I wanted to do for a living. So I really got into home brewing. And I kind of used that as a way to deal with the stress of working in marketing, which I was doing for a couple of years.”

It was soon apparent that Fleehart had a knack for brewing.

“I won some home brewing awards and was doing really well,” he said. “Then I got some volunteer work with Gilligan’s Brewing Company, which was one of the first nano-breweries in the company, along with Schooner Exact and Two Beers. While I was there, I helped brewing and filling growlers and got a little experience working with those guys.”

Fleehart soon was offered a chance to help out part time at Silver City Brewing in Silverdale. After losing his marketing job in 2009, he began brewing full time.

“(My wife and I) just decided that I should see if I could make a living as a brewer,” he said. “We had nothing else to lose. I was promoted to lead brewer after about a year. Then I got a job here, back when it was Trade Route.”

The commute from his residence in Bainbridge Island to Pacific proved too much for Fleehart, however, and he soon moved on to Fremont Brewing. After a year, however, it was back to Pacific.

With new ownership and a ramped-up capacity, Fleehart said, he jumped at the chance.

“It was a good opportunity for me to get back here,” he said.

Fleehart, under the leadership of new owners Greg Steed and Dan Anthony, set about reformulating the brewery’s recipes and updating the production process.

“The beer quality here when I was first here was mediocre because of our (technological) limitations,” he said. “So we put a little time and money and efforts into getting some of the basics down. It was frustrating, challenging, everything, to say the least. It was hard to make the best beer possible without the resources to do it. Over time we’ve added things to make it more like a real brewery. We’re still very manual in how we make beer, so it’s cool to see us winning awards with such a low-tech setup and things that shouldn’t actually work, but do. It’s a little bit of baling wire and duct tape.”

Judging by reaction in the beer community, however, the change is beginning to pay off for Northwest Brewing.

“We did a Bourbon Barrel-aged Imperial Stout that won a silver medal at the Washington Beer Awards,” Fleehart said. “And Hoppy Bitch won third place at the Reno’s CanFest. It was a shock but we were pretty happy with that.”

Fleehart said he’s busy fine-tuning Northwest’s brewing process and working with his three-man brew crew to make sure they put out consistently tasty beer, despite the obstacles.

“Our team is great. They do a lot of manual labor,” he said. “We have three guys who are passionate about making the best beer we can. We’re really fortunate. They’ve been instrumental in making better beer.”

For more information, visit www.northwestbrewingcompany.com.