Editor's note: This piece deals with topics some readers may find sensitive, including depression and suicide, therefore reader discretion is advised.

***

“We were a very temperamental cask brewery,” Danny McColl tells me. “[It was] pot luck if it was amazing—[and] down to me if it wasn’t.”

I’m sitting with Danny—founder of the eponymous McColl's Brewery—in his office inside the brewery itself, on a small industrial estate within the village of Evenwood, County Durham. He talks candidly, opening up about what he considers to be his failings, and how he found the mental resolve to overcome them in order to create a lauded business with a dedicated following within the North East.

Danny set his own brewery up in 2016, following a four-year stint as head brewer at Tirril Brewery, based in the village of Long Marton, near the edge of the Lake District. He was offered the current brewhouse “cheap” when West Yorkshire’s Wharfebank Brewery went into liquidation, and he had the vision that, over the years, he could grow his own brewery into a sustainable outfit.

The kit was modern, but Danny made the decision to brew cask beer in volume to sell cheaply to pubs. After all, this is what he says happened at Tirril where it was, according to Danny, producing “150 casks a week, every week. £60 [a] cask, 150 a week, get it out of the door.”

“I came here thinking all I have to do is 150 casks a week and it didn’t happen,” Danny says. “Because I did it [before] I thought I was capable of doing it and not even knowing it was the wrong [thing to do] as well.”

Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me.

He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself.

“She saw the warning signs in me,” Danny says. If it had gone much further—another year—it would’ve manifested itself in maybe alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.”

Thankfully the Danny McColl of today is a chipper presence, someone with infectious enthusiasm for everything he does—benefiting from being the opposite of a man who was being pulled in many directions. For this renaissance to occur it took an event that changed life for everyone around the world.

“Covid came along and it was a line in the sand. It was blessed,” he says. “This was the time to make the right decisions. If you’re going to come through Covid and make a go of it I thought ‘don’t fuck up again’.”

Fortuitously, Danny had taken the decision a week before the first lockdown to start canning his beer, leaving them with 2,000 cans of then-core beers to sell directly to customers now all pubs and bars were closed. He admits that without these the brewery would have been “dead in the water.”

But having this stock meant something greater to Danny. It was a golden opportunity to finally take charge of the situation and alter the course of his brewery, permanently.

“He was one of the first people to say ‘everything’s really terrible, how can we make a positive out of this,’” Andy Hickson of Whitley Bay’s Café Amsterdam tells me. “[That’s] Danny being Danny.”

His solution was to raise funds for a new taproom in Evenwood via crowdfunding, Doing this he would also devise new beer, a pilsner called Crowded. But in doing so, Danny also realised that he was in the wrong role, and if he was going to raise the quality of his brewery’s output, he needed a brewer who could do this for him.

Enter Simon Whittington (Si for short) who’d learnt his trade working for Camerons Brewery in Hartlepool.

““If you’re going to come through Covid and make a go of it I thought ‘don’t fuck up again’.””

— Danny McColl, McColl's Brewery

Si’s impressive CV includes setting up Tooth & Claw Brewing—the pilot brewery at Camerons—in 2017, before moving to Durham Brewery as head brewer, before finally joining McColl’s in early 2021. The brewery now expects to brew around 31 times a year, yielding approximately 91,550 pints annually.

Looking at Si’s wealth of experience it might seem strange that he would be attracted to a struggling cask brewery, but Danny convinced him he wanted to change and needed the right person to help him to do so.

“If the business was still doing what it was doing I wouldn’t have joined. There wouldn’t have been progression,” Si tells me.

***

“I’m the odd son,” Danny, who was born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, tells me. “I’m not the black sheep or anything—I’ve got an amazing family and extended family. Irish heritage, so full tilt—intense with lots of joy—but I was the first one to fly the nest and go to university.”

It was this upbringing that bestowed Danny with his positive attitude towards inclusivity, and chimes with the way parts of modern life are seeing a break down of old stereotypes and patriarchal views. And it’s thanks to the strong female figures in his life, including wife Gemma, that gifted Danny the ability to talk about tricky subjects, such as how Covid was difficult for most people, despite it having some benefits for his long-term business plan.

He tells me a story from during the first lockdown when he was delivering beer to customers at their homes and came across one man suffering from loneliness who was in a very bad place.

“I’m definitely not alone in being able to spot [mental health issues] but I can see the look in people’s eyes when you’ve been there and done it,” he tells me.

Danny became invested in supporting mental health initiatives aimed at men including a pie-making club—imaginatively called Men’s Pie Club—held in the taproom and donating profits from a range of beers to Mayday, a charity which raises awareness of men’s mental health, and tries to break down the surrounding stigma.

The customer Danny met during his delivery rounds attends the pie club, which is aimed at ending social isolation by getting men in kitchens baking and chatting to others. Although Danny tells me he has a long way to go, I’m also reassured he’s in a much better place than he was during the lockdowns.

Evenwood is home to a former mining community, and Danny believes that this has skewed some people’s views on work, with many men losing themselves in their jobs working harder than ever but in more isolated ways. Previously the mine gave employees a focus point and social life but today isolation is more common.

“So many people don’t know when to start moderating [their drinking],” Danny says. “It’s taken me some massive changes to get to that point but so many people just keep their head down and plough on regardless of the outcome.”

With people working harder than ever in hospitality we need more of these types of schemes, especially because the industry-at-large has a poor track record of dealing with mental health issues even before the pandemic and cost of living crisis.

““If you’re with a good friend in a pub, the beer is the support act.””

— Si Whittington, McColl's Brewery

“The craft beer industry wanted to be rock ‘n’ roll,” Danny says. “You had to get pissed, do silly things and live the high life. There’s certain parts of the industry where they still see it almost as a party where they roll from one event to another and one new beer to another.”

And that’s a message for us all to heed: stop chasing an impossible dream, think more strategically and cherish what we have. Thankfully, it just so happens that McColl’s beers are the perfect drink to unwind with in the sun, when we need to slow down and savour life.

***

There’s an openness to Danny which makes talking to him a pleasant experience, but I can’t remember anyone I’ve ever spoken to being so brutal about themselves.

He admits it was hard to shed a bad reputation when he was churning out cask and accepts that this made him doubt himself as a brewer—“I brewed shit [cask] beer. I brewed it on the new kit … because I’m an idiot.”

All this is hard to hear, though, because I can see the pain this must have caused Danny and how—despite his chippiness—he must have leant heavily on Si to change his business. His being the operative word as he started it and he’s the face of the operation, especially during his delivery rounds.

“He’s a bit hard on himself because his beers have developed brilliantly,” Graeme Robinson, a customer of Danny’s, tells me “He had an orange beer [Blood Orange IPA] in 2018 which sold massively one summer.”

Graeme, who runs several bars in the North East, including the Waiting Room and The Central Bar in Gateshead, believes that Danny admitting his mistakes in the past is key to the business thriving in 2024.

Like Danny, Graeme admits to having struggled with his own mental health, and feels it’s important to be open about them if men are going to take charge of the situation. He also believes that admitting to mistakes and actually making them in the first place is how businesses grow.

The early days of Danny’s hit-and-miss experimentation, though, have been replaced by a precision—brought to the brewery thank’s to Si’s years of experience—and a concentration on beers brewed seasonally that are clamoured for by McColl’s lovers.

Take Crowded, a complex but balanced pilsner that’s floral on the nose (citrus-y, like crushing a lime leaf and opening up the aromas) and with a bittersweet taste.

This bittersweetness is so finely balanced it both sweet and bitter are in perfect harmony, with bitter coming through first but sweetness lingering. It’s such a well put together beer—a real treat.

The yeast strain has its origins from Augustiner-Bräu in Munich. It’s a wet pitch from yeast specialist WHC Labs called Helles Fire, Danny tells me, and the slight bready flavour comes from a small addition of Munich Malt in the grist.

The water’s also key, and Si explains how County Durham’s soft water is ideal for light beers. “It’s just like a big blank canvas,” he tells me. “We can make whatever we want with it. It doesn’t get a lot of salt addition. Bit of gypsum, [that’s] pretty much it.”

There’s also a wonderful Belgian influence to be found in some of McColl’s beers, especially Lowlands, which became part of their core range this year.

Lowlands is described by McColl’s as a hoppy pale bier but according to Pete Marshall—a regular at Newcastle’s Free Trade Inn and huge fan of McColl’s beers—it’s a saison in all but name. “But made accessible,” he says. “No one would drink this and not like it as it’s not too far away from what they are used to.”

There’s a subtle estery flavour to Lowlands: a chewed strawberry hubba-bubba bubblegum, with the Hallertau Blanc hops providing a dry, fruity elderflower flavour, while the Galaxy provides a lemony edge. Si admits to the Belgian influence admitting he’s “heavily inspired” by Brussels’ Brasserie de la Senne with Danny claiming they’ve got Lowlands “down to a tee.”

“We want the beers to be as easy-going and drinkable as possible, Si tells me. “The beer should be secondary to the conversation you’re having. If you’re with a good friend in a pub, the beer is the support act.”

Pushing different beer styles onto their customers—especially in the brewery taproom—can be difficult though, as it’s a community operation with a band of locals accustomed to drinking beer from larger, well-established brands. Despite this McColl’s have won them over one by one, even with their Biere de Garde made from beetroot which came about when Si realised, “the flavour of beetroot is almost like an English hop.”

“If we were expecting people to come here and drink 15% sours that would be too radical,” Danny says. “If you’re introducing people to West Coast IPAs, saisons or [even] beetroot beer? Game on.”

***

95% of McColl’s beer is sold in the North East, including at their taproom, which opens every other weekend For the wider beer community the brewery remains somewhat of a secret, even among pilsner and West Coast IPA aficionados, despite how good Crowded and El Capitan (the brewery’s exceptional example of a Westie) is.

But for Danny, having Si in the brewery, while he delivers the beer in his white van is key to the business (When he picked me up from Darlington train station he tore through the countryside.)

““We’re not in the game of putting our name in lights and shouting about ourselves.””

— Danny McColl, McColl's Brewery

This allows him to be the face of the brewery and surprise customers on their doorstep—after I interviewed Pete he texted me the next day to say that Danny was knocking on his front door with a case he ordered and said he came in person as he just “happened to be passing.”

“We’re not in the game of putting our name in lights and shouting about ourselves. We don’t see banging the door down as massively important,” Danny says.

“[And] we’re not here to undercut local suppliers because we’re from the north east and can sell a £60 cask. That’s not our bag. We’ll grow in the next three, five, 10 years but none of it at breakneck speed. That’s the way I live my life now.”

Not living at ‘breakneck’ speed is key to everyone’s mental health and men especially should heed this advice. Too often it’s easy to not realise that we need moments to pause and talk about what’s bothering us—especially when 74% of all suicides are by men. If we don’t then we might become a stark statistic.

The greatest example of recognising you have a problem and acting on it is Danny. Because he may have been in a dark place but he’s found a patch of happiness in County Durham.

“We love what we do, we take it seriously and we live for that,” Danny says “I don’t live near the taproom—and that’s by design. We want to do our own thing but we want to be at work and we want to brew great beer.”