“The next thing I knew I had told the guy we didn’t have the money for him. He got very angry, started swearing at me and then chasing me on one of those single-wheel segways.”
In an industry frequently seduced by the pressure of relentless expansion, multi-site taprooms, and national supermarket listings, Donzoko Brewing Company stands as a bold testament to doing the exact opposite. Founded by Reece Hugill, Donzoko is built on an uncompromising commitment to beer quality, hyper-local community, and a fierce, distinct sense of place rooted in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Approaching its tenth anniversary, the brewery has evolved from an eccentric student experiment into one of the UK’s most revered independent brewpubs. But the journey from homebrewing in a school kitchen to running a 10-hectolitre copper brewhouse in the North East is a story filled with chaos, Austrian Segway chases, and an unwavering devotion to lager.
The story of Donzoko began nearly a decade ago when Reece Hugill was studying chemistry at Newcastle University. During a study abroad year in Munich—a last-minute pivot after plans to study in Vermont fell through—Reece found his true calling.
While in Munich, Reece spent his evenings homebrewing in a school kitchen after hours (arranged by a friend whose mother worked there) and fermenting the liquid in a residential apartment. At the same time, his academic life involved lab placements focusing on sugar chemistry. The contrast between cold academic science and the living art of brewing was immediate.
“I was doing like sugar chemistry at university, and like on a placement making vaccines or sugars. And I was like, you know, when I’m doing chemistry at home, making like boiling sugar, but making beer, that’s a lot more like exciting and fun than the sugar chemistry I’m doing in the lab. Everyone there is depressed. No one’s getting paid well… I was not going to be the next Nobel Prize, so I was thinking, well, maybe I cut my losses. I graduate now… and I see what I try and make beer somehow.”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
Hugill didn’t aim to build a mega-brewery; he simply wanted to create and drink the characterful, unfiltered lagers and Zwickels he had discovered in Franconian village brewpubs, beers that were virtually non-existent in the UK craft scene at the time.
To help kickstart his dream, Newcastle University provided a £17,000 grant in 2015. Reece purchased a single fermenter, set it up inside a former PE changing room in Hartlepool, made the space food-safe, and struck a deal to use the 10-barrel test kit at nearby Cameron’s Brewery. His traditional, esoteric techniques quickly raised eyebrows among local commercial brewers.
“None of the brewers understood like what I was trying to do. I was using Pilsner malt, which is obviously more expensive. I was trying to do like step mash and decoctions, and I do like natural acidification. So I bring sour wort, and then I add that to a different stage of the process… I’d have just buckets of sour wort, and I had to explain that like, yeah, this is going in the beer, but like, yeah, just don’t worry about it.”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
Reece would transport hot wort in IBC containers back to his fermenter in Hartlepool, package it six weeks later, and sell it to the Free Trade Inn—the famous Newcastle pub where he was working as a bartender. Local drinkers embraced it, demand snowballed, and Donzoko was officially under way.
Building a brewery on a shoe-string budget requires adaptation. Plans to establish a permanent facility in Manchester alongside Cloudwater were derailed when the pandemic struck in 2020. Unwilling to take on crippling debt, Reece relocated his three fermenting tanks to Edinburgh to share a brewkit with friends.
For a long stretch, Donzoko was a completely solo endeavor. Reece handled every aspect of the business, from brewing and manual packaging to sales and local deliveries, with his parents occasionally driving up from Middlesbrough to help him package cans. However, as the wider craft market began to slow down and larger breweries stumbled under the weight of rapid expansion, Reece took a step back to refine Donzoko’s core identity.
“I kind of took a step back and thought, ‘What do I want Donzoko to be? What do I want this business to be?, And really, what it was is, I want to make the best beer I can at a human scale and at a community scale… What I want to do is have a local community, like those brew pubs in Franconia, where the beer is drunk in the guest house, in the Keller, in the village, and then it doesn’t go anywhere else. Like that’s what I want because that’s how that beer is meant to be drunk. It’s a sense of place, and that’s what we’d always lacked.”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
To achieve that genuine sense of place, Donzoko needed its own home and a purpose-built brewhouse. Hugill envisioned a traditional European copper kit featuring a mash kettle, lauter tun, and whirlpool. After searching auction sites across Europe, he spotted a classic copper brewhouse sitting inside an abandoned steakhouse brewpub in Vienna.
Reece flew to Austria, inspected the kit in the dark building, and put in a successful offer. While sitting at the nearby Kleine’s Cafe sipping pints and running financial calculations, an experience that later inspired Donzoko’s Vienna Lager, Kleine’s, he secured the deal. However, extracting the kit turned into a wild saga.
While dismantling the brewhouse with a crew of Hungarian contractors, a massive banking roadblock hit. The Austrian bank repossessing the equipment had failed to pull out of sanctioned regions, prompting the UK Financial Crimes Authority to block the international fund transfer.
“I told the guy and he got very angry and he was like running after me. I was having a panic attack because I need to walk away… and he was coming after me, and he had also—you know those Segways where it has one wheel in the middle? He was after me on that! I was like, ‘No, I need to leave.'”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
Escaping the Segway-riding auctioneer, Reece ducked into Vienna’s Prater theme park, drank six pints of Budvar, went on fairground rides to clear his head, and secured a £60,000 payday loan the following morning to pay for the kit. After surviving a temporary stint stored beneath Leeds Bradford Airport, the copper brewhouse finally arrived in Tyneside.
Donzoko came full circle by establishing its 10-hectolitre brewpub in Newcastle, just around the corner from where Reece poured his very first commercial pints. Capable of hosting 130 guests across its indoor and outdoor spaces, the taproom stands as a physical extension of Reece’s DIY ethos.
Built largely by hand alongside his parents, the interior is rich in history and personal artistry. Front panels for the bar were salvaged from 300-year-old church pews, while custom backlit stained glass behind the bar was designed and crafted by Reece’s mother. The beer taps themselves are fully restored, hand-painted brass ball-valve fixtures sourced from French eBay—each at least a century old. Overhead hangs a dramatic 30-meter velvet curtain, set against original exposed brickwork and an eclectic mix of recycled furniture.
“There’s not a lot of money going into the space, but there’s a lot of thought,” says Reece. “When you have a lot of time to think about opening somewhere, you can put a lot of time into collecting things, making things, making it feel like you’re in a special place that people want to come back to.”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
To maintain hyper-local integrity, Donzoko uses a fleet of steel kegs that explicitly stay within the local Newcastle postcode. Reece firmly rejects the urge to flood national markets.
“We can really easily erase really special parts of beer culture by having everything available all the time, everywhere. I want to go places. I want to drink The Kerne in London. I want to drink Deya in Cheltenham,” says Hugill. “Our beers are brewed with those pubs and those drinkers in mind… We’re trying to build a culture and get people to come here and drink it rather than spread ourselves around.”
Donzoko’s brewing strategy avoids churning out superficial, weekly “specials.” Instead, recipes undergo rigorous development before joining a permanent, highly curated lineup.
The brewery’s foundation is Northern Helles, a rustic lager designed as the ultimate fridge beer that balances bready malt, crisp acidity, floral hop notes, low bitterness, and a thick, pillow-soft head. Building on that foundation is Big Foam, an uncompromising lager packed with seven grams per liter of hot-side hops. It features unmalted spelt sourced directly from local farm Craggs & Co, paired with Hallertau Blanc hops brought in straight from a farm in Germany to yield a distinct, white-wine acidity.
For dark beer enthusiasts, Donzoko brews Donnies, a smooth nitro dark lager made with a traditional stout grain bill and lager yeast, designed as an honest, sessionable alternative to mass-market stout options. The portfolio is rounded out by Keller, the brewery’s sole cask offering. An amber lager brewed with Vienna malt and single-hopped with rotating monthly German varieties, Keller bridges the gap between Franconian cellar lagers and British cask bitters, served strictly on cask across Tyneside.
“Lager and cask beer on the face of it are so far apart. But then when you go to the outer reaches of the more esoteric versions of those two things, they become the same thing again… It’s nice to see people come in the taproom, ask for a banked pint, they get a big foamy pint of Keller, and it makes me feel good inside.”
Reece Hugill, Donzoko
As Donzoko approaches its 10th year, Reece’s brewing approach has evolved from rigid, textbook science to sensory intuition and genuine passion. “When I first started brewing, I was very textbook first. I come from a science background,” he reflects. “Now… I want to brew beers my way… It’s less hitting numbers; it’s more hitting the beer. This is beer how I want it to be.”
For Donzoko, success is not measured in commercial scale or supermarket volume, but in community ownership, uncompromising quality, and the simple joy of creating great beer in the North East.
“We’ve done a good job, and we’re heading in a nice direction that’s not getting bigger. It’s not becoming the next BrewDog—it’s going in a more wholesome direction,” Hugill concludes. “My entire life’s work pretty much has been making lagers here, and it’s got some fruition to it, which isn’t money, but it’s everything else. And that’s what matters really.”
