Sixty years of Timothy Taylor's award-winning Landlord

21-May-2012 - Last updated on 22-May-2012 at 15:50 GMT

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Timothy Taylor: Sixty years young

Roger Protz says we should all raise our glasses to 60 glorious years of Timothy Taylor’s award-winning Landlord pale ale.

There’s more cause for celebration. Last month, I devoted a page in the PMA to Marston’s Pedigree, the Burton pale ale that’s commemorating 60 glorious years on the beer throne.

Now I discover that, further north, Timothy Taylor’s brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire, has an identical birthday: the 60th anniversary of Landlord, its 4.3% ABV multi award-winning pale ale. It has been crowned Champion Beer of Britain four times — that’s more than any other beer and it won the accolade two years running in 1982 and 1983. When it last won the title — in 2000 — it also took the Supreme Championship Cup in the Brewing Industry International Awards.

It’s some beer and, in common with Marston’s, the name was chosen as a result of a competition among drinkers. Back in 1952, Tim Taylor, in common with most family brewers, confined its sales to its home base and the competition was aimed just at the Keighley area. The new beer was designed by company chairman Philip Taylor, a trained brewer. The beer was meant to be a bottled product and was based on a beer brewed occasionally in the 1930s called BB.

The award for the new name went not to a publican but to the steward of the Drill Hill club in Keighley. He was given £500. Philip Taylor’s daughter Rebecca was an art student and she designed the label with the image of a jovial landlord resplendent in a bright red waistcoat.

Marston’s has launched a special bottled version of Pedigree with a retro label of the beer from the 1950s. There’s no question of Taylor’s doing that: they don’t talk much about “retro” in Keighley. The same image has survived since 1952, though the extravagant cravat worn by the landlord has been scaled down a tad.

Purity of water
Landlord’s success in bottles propelled the beer into cask in 1954. The firm brews a full portfolio of ales, including dark and light milds and a Best Bitter. But Landlord is its most famous beer and it’s now available the length and breadth of the country.

It’s dubbed “premium bitter” these days but — again in common with Pedigree — it’s a true example of pale ale. No dark malts are used — just 100% Golden Promise barley malt. Golden Promise is widely used as the base for Scottish whisky and there’s a connection between beer and whisky. The Taylor brewery is based at Knowle Spring, a site chosen for the purity of the water that flows down from the Pennines. The late Lord Ingrow, formerly brewery chairman John Taylor, used to take supplies of the spring water home with him to mix with his Scotch.

Along with malt and water, Landlord is made with hops — and the hops are used in a most unusual way. English Fuggles and Goldings are packed in the copper boil for bitterness but, prior to fermentation, the extract known as ‘hopped wort’ lies on a deep bed of Styrian Goldings, where it picks up an exquisite floral and citrus aroma.

Styrian Goldings come from the small country of Slovenia, the most northerly part of former Yugoslavia. They are commonly used in Britain but were rare in the early 1950s. Peter Eells, Timothy Taylor’s head brewer, says that when Landlord was born the brewery was using American hops. But they had become expensive and Philip Taylor heard Davenports brewery in Birmingham was a great user of Styrian Goldings and he decided to experiment.

Rich reward
The success of Landlord helped save the brewery. In 1951, members of the Taylor family considered selling the company as a result of high death duties, along with competition from bigger brewers and the growing demands of the free trade. Fortunately the brewery survived and thrived. The brewing scene has changed out of all recognition. The decline of heavy industry meant Timothy Taylor no longer had a small army of thirsty mill workers to supply. It owned just 29 pubs and had to grow outside Yorkshire.

Sales of the beers, with Landlord to the fore, have reaped a rich reward. In 1999, seven new fermenters were installed to cope with increased demand but by 2000 capacity had to be further extended and a new fermenting house was installed. Capacity was reached again and in 2003, at a cost of £2.5m, the brewery was expanded with four new fermenting vessels.

In total, £11m has been spent this century on updating and expanding the brewery. The final phase, completed last September, saw six more fermenters installed — costing £2.7m.

It’s a remarkable success story, a testimony to the growing demand for beer of the finest quality. “Come, landlord, fill the flowing bowl until it doth flow over”, as they say in Keighley and adjacent areas.