no. 055 | Dookit
Dookit Brewing is a one-man microbrewery based in Glasgow’s East End. Small in name and nature, Harry Weskin’s making characterful beers that are as carefully considered as they are creative.
A dookit is a Glasgow thing. Technically a word to describe a structure built to house pigeons or doves, it’s also the local word for any snug or compact space. It is, as the founder of the business that took it for its name will tell you, a pretty perfect name for a Glaswegian microbrewery.
Harry Weskin founded Dookit in the summer of 2020, releasing his first two beers by Christmas. He had moved to Glasgow from London in 2019, drawn by family ties, a love of the city, and a passion for lager and the exceptionally soft water that the city is blessed with. But when COVID hit while he was between brewing jobs, the options narrowed quickly. So he did what brewers do: he brewed. “I started home brewing again like mad,” he says, “probably to stop myself going mad from cabin fever too.” By early summer a friend had offered him space at his brewery, and Harry jumped at it, cuckoo brewing there for a year before buying a second-hand brewhouse and settling into a shared space on the edge of town.
The name came to him on a cycling trip along the Yoker canal path, where he encountered his first Glasgow dookits. The modest, handbuilt pigeon lofts litter the city’s rooftops and back greens and he was immediately taken. “They and the dookeepers behind them capture something essential about Glasgow,”
he says, “its can-do and industrious spirit.” The colloquial meaning felt just right for what he wanted to build: open, unhurried, and resolutely small by design. “Dookit Brewing will always be small by name and small by nature.”
It is, so far, a one-man show. Harry plans to hire his first employee on the brewing side this year, and keeps an eye on a longer horizon: a Dookit neighbourhood bar on the Southside of Glasgow, and perhaps a second site closer to the brewery in the East End. Brewing at Dookit is creative but considered, ranging across styles that run from fruited sours to exacting lagers. He’s not one for rigid style definitions. “Brewing is cooking after all,” he says. “I allow for taste and the balancing of flavours to take centre stage.”
Artwork is equally central to who Dookit is. Harry has collaborated with over forty artists on labels and keg badges, and the creative process is something he clearly cherishes. “It inspires and motivates me. I’ve also made some great friends along the way.”
One beer in this batch carries a particularly good story. Huffman’s Best Bitter takes its name from a rare American pigeon breed, and it came into being through an improbable chain of events. On a cold November evening Harry sat down and tried to sketch some Huffman pigeons himself (with limited success). The very next morning, an email arrived unbidden from Elise Prentice, a local artist with a long history of painting pigeons. The connection between the two had a funnier backstory still: a nearby business had recently opened under the name ‘The Dookit’, and Harry had been fielding a stream of misdirected calls and messages ever since. One voicemail, asking for “two White Huffman’s”, lodged itself in his mind. He’d always wanted to brew a Best Bitter and the name, it turned out, had already arrived.