Excellence as standard

After 150 years, brewer Timothy Taylor's beers are in ever-increasing demand. Roger Protz looks at the company's history and what makes their ales so special

Stolid Yorkshire folk aren't given to making a fuss, but they had good grounds for celebrating last week as Timothy Taylor of Keighley recorded 150 years of brewing. It's a remarkable achievement. The company has survived two world wars, a threatened takeover, the Depression of the 1930s and the constant turmoil of the modern brewing industry.

Most family brewers gave up the struggle long ago. But true Yorkshire grit has seen Taylor's through. Today, it can celebrate not only an admirable history, but also a welcome upsurge in the demand for its beers.

The company has come a long way from its humble origins in 1858. Timothy Taylor lived up to his family name by working as a tailor. He was successful and opened two branches of the business. There are no records to show why he made the switch from tailoring to brewing, although it may have been the tragic death of his wife's brother from typhoid fever, the result of drinking contaminated water. Taylor was probably aware that, in an age when tap water was often insanitary, beer was a healthy as well as invigorating drink.

Keighley at the time was a busy mill town with prodigious thirsts to quench. The town had 18 full on-licences and nine simple beer houses that served a population of 18,000. In the surrounding districts of Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield and Leeds there were 7,459 pubs that made their own beer on the premises. Taylor, with a sharp eye for business, could see there was money to be made from brewing.

His first modest brewery opened in Cook Lane. When it was sold in 1865, it was described as a plant of modern construction with, significantly, "an abundant supply of good water". His new brewery opened in 1863 on the site of the Knowle Spring, which supplied "brewing liquor" of the highest quality to the new brewhouse. Taylor built a home on the spot and called it Knowle Spring House. He started to build a small estate of pubs and supplied them with the brown ales and stouts that were in vogue at the time.

Taylor farmed alongside the brewery and grew barley for himself and others. He recognised early on that the finest malted barley was as essential to good beer as pure water.

He bought more pubs, extending his interests to Bradford and Leeds as well as Keighley, and also developed strong free trade business through working men's clubs and off-licences. By the time of his death in 1898 he was not only a wealthy man with an estate worth £50,000 — a small fortune at the time — but a reputation for brewing some of the finest beer in the West Riding.

His sons Robert and Percy took over the business and by 1911 trade was so good that the Knowle Spring site was extended, with new buildings that housed a mill, cast-iron mash tun and a coal-fired boiling copper. Astonishingly, all this equipment served the brewery until 1976, when the copper was replaced.

The First World War created major problems for all brewers. Licensing hours were restricted, supplies of malt were cut back, excise duty was increased and beer strength was reduced to an average 3%. Trade slowly picked up in the 1920s, but the future of Taylor's was threatened in 1922 when the large Burton brewer Allsopps made a bid for the company.

Fortunately, Allsopps turned its attention to Arrols of Alloa in Scotland. The scare encouraged Robert and Percy to turn Taylor's into a private limited liability company, but further problems followed when the American stock market collapsed, ushering in the Great Depression, which lasted until the outbreak of yet another world war in 1939.

Taylor's was steered through these challenging times by two stalwarts of the family — Philip Taylor and

John Aked Taylor; John was later ennobled as Lord Ingrow. They had to save it from closure when death duties threatened collapse. This crisis was followed by a call from some members of the family to sell up. They claimed it was impossible to compete with the new national brewers and their heavily-promoted keg beers.

That siren call was resisted and Timothy Taylor strode into the new age of beer and brewing with a cask beer called Landlord, an iconic brew that won it national acclaim and a vast array of medals, cups and awards in both industry and Campaign for Real Ale competitions.

In 1952 chairman Philip Taylor asked head brewer Sidney Fairclough to design a new pale ale and a competition among Keighley drinkers resulted in the draught beer being named Landlord.

Fairclough and his successor, the legendary head brewer Allen Hay, fashioned a beer brewed from the finest Golden Promise malting barley, English Fuggles and Goldings hops, with Styrian Goldings from Slovenia. It's the combination of juicy, biscuity Scottish malt and floral, spicy Styrians that gives the beer its renowned aroma, flavour and drinkability.

In spite of those who felt the company could not compete with keg, Taylor's climbed to success with a passionate belief in cask beer. It has never brewed a keg brand, though John Taylor loved to tell the story of how they won the Brewers' Guardian Keg Pale Ale Challenge Cup in 1976: "We simply put the bottled version of Landlord into a keg and sent it down for judging — and it won!"

Taylor's continues to produce a full portfolio of beers — including dark and light milds and best bitter — but it's Landlord that is now the biggest brand. Demand for Landlord has increased to such an extent that close to £10m has been invested in the brewery in recent years.

Seven new fermenters were installed in 1999, but they had to be augmented by four additional ones in 2003. They have been joined by an automated cask-filling plant, new malt silos and a conveyor system. Barrellage has grown from 30,000 a year in 1990 to 60,000 today, but still demand shows no sign of slackening and further investment is required.

Managing director Charles Dent, a Taylor by marriage, is optimistic about the future, even though his strategy is unusual among regional brewers. He has just 30 pubs and relies for the bulk of his sales on the freetrade.

"That's our strength, not a weakness," he says. "Years ago a tied pub would sell 90% of its beer from the owning brewery — now there are often eight other beers on the bar, plus Guinness, cider and lager, as well as food and drink.

"Tied estates can be deceptive. Brewers used to sell everything they made through their pubs, but it doesn't wash now. When the sums are done, it would be better to close the breweries and just run the pubs.

"The freetrade gives you discipline. All pubs want strong brands and customers want reliability and consistency." But doesn't dealing with modern pub companies mean offering large discounts? "How do spell 'discount'?" he chuckles.

He welcomes the smoking ban and thinks it will attract a new audience to pubs who avoided them when they were smoky. "It has hit the bottom end of pubs and clubs, but they would have gone anyway."

His anger is reserved for "that robber" Alistair Darling and his infamous duty increase along with progressive beer duty, which, he feels, gives smaller breweries an unfair advantage by being able to sell beer at £50 a barrel less than he can. He would like to see a new scheme introduced that would give lower rates of duty to cask-beer breweries who use returnable casks, home-grown malt and mainly English hops.

But he faces the future with profound optimism and can look back with pride on a great Yorkshire institution that has reached a formidable milestone in its history.