Bound by a love of fermentation and foraged ingredients, First & Last Brewery is inspired by the wild, untamed landscape and dark skies of northumberland. Founded by Red and Sam Kellie in 2016, the duo has created a community asset to be proud of.
“There is no instruction book when it comes to working with foraged ingredients. There is variance from year-to-year and that keeps us really excited,” says Red Kellie, co-founder of Northumberland’s First & Last Brewery. “It really depends on how wet it has been, how sunny it has been or if you’ve had a really dry season followed by a massive cloudburst. Sometimes the sweetness, the tartness, the juiciness of that ingredient will natural change from year to year is a beautiful thing.”
Red is joint owner and head brewer of the First & Last Brewery. Founded with husband Sam, First & Last is a family-run brewery, taproom and event space situated in rural Northumberland. The brewery doubles as a community space used for everything from art workshops to gigs and literature events. They brew a wide range of styles from hazy IPAs, through to sours, wheat beers, stouts and Belgian beers.
At their core, they enjoy brewing well-balanced beers that you want to have another sip of, as well as those using locally sourced & foraged ingredients to produce seasonal specialty beers that offer a true taste of Northumberland.
After helping to establish Stu Brew at Newcastle University, Europe’s first student run brewery, then Twice Brewed Brewery, Red set up the First & Last Brewery in 2016. Here, her driving passion is for pairing wild ingredients from the local hedgerows and forests with beer styles, so that their qualities complement and accentuate each other.
Working with fresh, hand-picked ingredients such as gorseflowers, sprucetips, bullaces and wild raspberries also give her the perfect excuse to be outside soaking up the beautiful local landscape.
And in 2026, the team mark 10 years since the brewery was incorporated. A decade of evolution, and experimentation producing a wealth of beers while establishing a business that is a bedrock of the local community in Bellingham and beyond.
“It’s been a bit of a journey, really,” smiles Kellie. “My husband Sam and I has been home brewing since we were married. Fermentation is a love of our life. We started with wild ingredient wines, then got ourselves into beer and then found ourselves building a little brew kit.”
Some years later Kellie would be working at Newcastle University, liaising with volunteers on a raft of sustainability projects. The opportunity arose to bid or funding from the Student Green Fund and the university would find itself successful in not one, but seven applications. One of those would be for a project to build a brewery. “It was a madcap idea but one they said yes to. Everyone was pleasantly surprised but it was great news and time to start thinking about it a little more seriously!” she laughs.
The funding gave Kellie and her colleagues the opportunity to start exploring how the business side of such an operation could work.
“We got a team together, an absolutely cracking team of students to help range out the ideas of what a student-run micro brewery would look like, how it would fit within the university, the Student Union, and how it would feed into our environmental credentials. That included the brewing process through the business functions, marketing, sales, logistics and everything in-between.”
And while this student-run brewery was starting to take shape, both Red and Sam were forming their own ideas of what a brewing business of their very own could be. But back at the university, in 2013, the student brewery was developing.
“We worked alongside Dr Chris O’Malley in the chemical engineering department at Newcastle University and ended up with a site in the chemical engineering department to actually set up this micro brewery,” she says. And in August 2013 Stu Brew was launched.
When it was launched in August 2013, the brewery became one of only 25 environmental and sustainability initiatives in the UK to be awarded funding from the National Union of Students’ ‘Student Green Fund’. Stu Brew was set up through Student Community Action Newcastle (SCAN) and is now part of Go Volunteer. While all sales profits are invested back into training and development for students and overall long-term sustainability of the enterprise.
Stu Brew is Europe’s first student-run microbrewery based at Newcastle University. It’s a sustainable microbrewery, managed by students through Newcastle University Students’ Union. The brewery is capable of producing around 1000L per batch and is available at venues across the University campus, including Luther’s, EAT@Newcastle venues along with external pubs and bars around Newcastle and increasingly further afield.
Their original 2.5BBL facility was installed in August 2014 with the first brew being 16th November 2014. In June 2018 they expanded the capacity of the brewhouse to 6BBL. They also have a 20L experimental kit for recipe design and small-scale brews.
Set up with sustainability at heart, hops are grown on the student allotments and the brewing process uses a hot water recovery system to make the process more energy efficient. They send spent malt to a local farmer for use as animal feed and hop residue gets composted on the allotments.
Stu Brew has established a partnership with the School of Engineering and act as a research unit for sustainable brewery design, seeking to become an example of good environmental practice in the brewing field. While working closely with academics from the school and other local microbreweries in the North East to improve our process and share best practice.
“It was a real adventure,” says Kellie. “As the first one in Europe there was no real model for us to work around. But what we knew was that we wanted to involve students from every single different department from business, from Art and Design, from the marketing department, from biology, chemistry. The lot!.”
Students came into Stu Brew all armed with their own ideas. Bonded by a common desire to get brewing and to make a product they could go on to sell. Red and Chris would broaden their own knowledge thanks to several courses at Brewlab in Sunderland and 13 years on, Stu Brew remains it own living, breathing entity. “It was a really, really exciting time,” says Kellie. “For me, one of the most rewarding parts is how everyone works together. Each year there is a new gang all with their own fresh energy. To see it continue to grow is great to see.”
Kellie is also gratified by the impact that alumni of Stu Brew have made in the wider brewing industry.
“There is a lovely feedback loop of learning, along with the development of techniques and processes that is felt across other breweries in the region and all over the country. We have students leaving the university, often after focusing on one particular part of the brewing process and as a result, breweries across the UK benefit. We’ve seen students go on to work at places like Cameron’s Brewery, Beavertown and more. To have them go on and forge their own careers is just lush.”
“I started out with country wines, with the old demijohns, as most people do. I quite quickly moved into beer, though. I really love beer, inspired by breweries like The Kernel. Even when I see breweries working with really interesting ingredients, I like to see a really solid beer behind it.
I don’t think like things which are kind of a one dimensional flavour. Where we started out brewing. We got, like a we bought a load of 100 liter stock pots and built our own kind of stainless set up, and started just brewing 100 liters at a time in a garage, as many people do.
We started experimenting with wild ingredient and all of your you know your standard kind of brews at that time as well, and started developing. And some of those recipes, actually, that we did in those first kind of months and years are still with us now.
They’ve been obviously tweaked and changed over the years, but it’s really nice to see like Equinox was one of our first beers that we ever brewed on our own kit, on our own 100 liter kit, and then the first one that we ever did, we used Stu brew, and we used Twice Brewed brewery kit, is when we were cuckoo brewing, when we were first starting out our journey. And, yeah, it’s nice to see that those staples are still, are still with us, really, as a brewery, that they’ve kind of stood the test of time.
Before their own brewery came to be, Red would help Reuben Strakar set up the business while also working with husband Sam to start First & Last, All while working at Stu Brew part time….
“I think I started out three days a week for them, and I was still working at Stu Brew brew, so I kind of reduced my hours at Stu Brew and took up some work with him, and then we were still kind of developing our own project and raising our own capital in the background for first and last. So at that point, I ended up brewing in the end for three different breweries, and was working seven days a week. I mean, it was just absolutely crazy. It was really crazy.
“I was cuckoo brewing for our brewery, helping to plan out Twice Brewed but always a view that I would step back at a certain point, once our business was up-and-running.
“So in 2018 we’d got to the point where we’d raised enough capital. We’d bought our brew kit. We’ve got a site to set it up in. We had to put electricity and water supply and everything into the place that we were setting ours up in. So it was quite a mission, and they had to change the transformer for the electricity supply in the village.
“There was all sorts of different stuff that needed to go on. So it took us quite a while, but I was. We were brewing our own beers, but you’re just using Stu Brew and Twice Brewed.”
But now, in 2026, Red and Sam can look back at ten years of their very own brewery with First & Last. A brewery that has come a long way since bring established a decade ago, starting in Elsdon, Northumberland before In 2022 relocating a few miles away to Bellingham. A true adventure in brewing….
“We incorporated the business in 2016 and we started brewing our own beers. We got had our license, we had a cold store, we just had no brewery. So we cuckoo brewed for about a year and a half. And then 2018 we got our own kit, and that was like moving into our own kind of home, which was really, really satisfying.
“And 10 years I can’t tell you how mad it is just to think how quickly those 10 years have gone round. It’s been really wonderful, though. When I say it’s an adventure in brewing, we use that a lot.
“Adventures in brewing is because it is every day has just felt like a fresh part of the journey, and a fresh kind of set of challenges to overcome and a set of ideas to pull together, and we’re still feeling really enthused about it.
“We do a lot of reflection, and it’s nice and easy, because Sam and I, husband and wife, you know, it has kind of taken over our lives this business. but we absolutely love it. there always seem to be new things to get excited about. From setting up the taproom which has been, a massive learning curve to everything else besides.
“Now we’ve come around 10 years, and we’re doing the celebration of 10 beers for 10 years, and that is enabling us to really hark back to our original ethos of what we want to achieve through running this business.”
Both Red and Same come from teaching and the voluntary sector and sustainability backgrounds, and they both did environmental degrees. As a result, community and sustainability are two massively important issues for the duo, no matter what jobs they’ve been doing throughout life, and they’re trying to use the 10 beers for 10 years to link each beer into one kind of strand of their of our ethos and what they’re trying to do and achieve through the brewery.
“They will be working alongside local charitable organizations. Our community here in this part of Northumberland is massively important to us. So how do we involve them in brewing beers, coming up with ideas, and them kind of helping us forage for foraged ingredients, actually rocking up and brewing on a brew day,” she explains.
“We’ll be doing kind of charitable donations through a couple of the different beers. We want to collaborate with other local businesses like we’ve got, we do a lot of markets and festivals. So there’s a couple of different local producers based within Northumberland, from chocolate to honey, that we will be working with. Each beer has a purpose.”
First & Last Brewery have their core “bread and butter” beers that are primarily reflected in their eight-strong cask offering. These include numbers ssuch as Equinox Pale Ale, Mad Jack Ha’ Session IPA and Reiver Bitter as well as Red Rowan Irish Red Ale, and Eclipse Stout.
Elsewhere the brewery’s ‘Made with Northumberland’ range of craft beers are infused with their love for Northumberland. Lockdown forced many to slow down and to reconnect with natural spaces.
And this proved to be the perfect opportunity for the team to go back to their home brewing and country wine making roots, and experiment with brewing with the fruits and flowers that grow around the local area.
These beers, Kellie says, offer a true taste of Northumberland, with each containing at least one ingredient that they have locally sourced or picked themselves. This means that they vary from year to year depending on the amount of sunlight, temperature, and rainfall they have had over the growing season.
These have included a Damson Porter, Gorseflower Pale, Hedgerow Fruit Gose, and Elderflower & Meadowsweet Pale, with many more besides and also more coming down the line, too.
“Brewing these beers is about challenging ourselves as brewers; working out when the best time is to pick, the best point to add them in the brewing process and the most appropriate beer style to match the ingredient to,” she says.
“It also means that we get to spend more time exploring rural Northumberland sourcing and picking these ingredients and reduces the environmental impact of the beer itself.”
For Red and Sam, producing a mix of beer styles, often seasonal, was part of the duo’s ethos and identity from the off.
“It’s always been a driving force of us. It’s where we started off with our fermentation journey. Collecting berries from the hedgerows. We were going sloe berry picking and experimenting with things like spruce tips with Gorseflower,” she tells us.
“We’ve always been into that, to now be able to actually sell that as a commercial product that people not only will buy just to try once, but they look forward to the return of those beers.
“They’re very seasonal. They’re brewed, they come, they go, and it’s nice to have that seasonality, which reflects the turning of the year for us. Sometimes we can’t keep up with brewing everything that we’ve brewed before. But some become stalwarts and we know our fantastic customers wouldn’t be happy if we didn’t make them!”
According to Red, her and Sam truly enjoy the process of working with brewing, and working with a new ingredient. “There’s no instruction booklet of how to use them, where to use them, how much of them to use. I love the fact that in the brewing process, we’ve got so many different stages of the brewing process to play with those ingredients and to see how we can get the best flavour and aroma results out of them.”
She adds: “There’s so much to play out with brewing, isn’t there? It is alchemy, there is biology, chemistry, but it’s creative as well. And I think that people can put their own skills into it and see their own ideas come together and make a saleable, beautiful, delicious product.
And now more than decade in, Red can reflect on a journey that has involved different breweries, different brews and different beers. A story she is right to be proud of.
“Sometimes we’re not very good at looking back and just going and taking a breath and going, Oh my goodness. How much things have changed since we were, you know, behind a pub in Elsdon, our first little kind of five barrel Kit, and I am really proud. I’m really proud that people from our local community want to use the space and come and enjoy the beers so much as well.
“It’s so rural where we are so there isn’t anything else like this within the next, kind of couple of valleys over in each direction. But we thought we’d never be able to have more than four or five beers on at a time.
“But now the taproom is four days a week every week. But you do kind of take a breath sometimes and go, Yeah, this is, this is great. And we get to do this as our living you know, which is all we really wanted out of it”
