When you work in a place for so long, especially a place like this which is a family company it becomes like a second home. Because it’s a family who own the brewery, working here is like being part of a family. Mostly we have a laugh, sometimes it’s hard work but the people who work here are lovely people so it’s a really nice place to come to work, I always look forward to it.

We do quite a lot for the local community, obviously our business is supplying beer to pubs and we have some pubs in Keighley which people enjoy going to. Overall we employ over 100 people, not all on this site, and a lot of them are local people. We also do quite a lot of charity raising and charity work, we are big supporters of Manorlands Hospice in Oxenhope and we have a massive fundraising event in November each year, which raises lots of money.

Quite a few other people here have done this scheme where once a week they’ve had half an hour with a child in the school to help them read a book and they found that really rewarding. We try to do as much stuff as possible to help people locally. The best part is working with all the people here no doubt about that. The second best thing is drinking the beer at the end of it.

My favourite beer is, is the beer we brew most of, it’s called Landlord and it was first created in 1953. It was really ahead of its time as quite a pale beer in colour but quite hoppy, it’s the best of everything we have here. There’s the water that comes from underground, the special malt barley we use, the special hops we use and our own yeast which is unique to us. Landlord is the best expression of all those things together.

The fermentations take a whole week and they vary throughout, as the yeast ferments it’s different every day. That’s probably my favourite part, it’s following all these fermentations through the week, sometimes it feels like they’re your children, you know, going through their life cycle.

The best memory of my time here would be learning from the previous head brewer Peter, we had a great relationship and are still friends outside of the brewery now. Even though I’ve been to university to learn the theory, Peter really showed me how to brew beer like we do at Timothy Taylor’s.

I think it all started because my father didn’t like me going to the pub that he used to go to with all my mates. And so he said, why don’t you learn to brew beer at home and then your friends can come home instead of bothering me at the pub. So I said, yeah, fine, but it sort of backfired on him because we still went to the pub and then everybody came back to my place afterwards to drink my beer. So that set the scene really, I never thought of doing anything else really.

Keighley has built Timothy Taylor’s because although our beer is sold all over the UK now, when it started off, it was basically sold in Keighley, maybe Haworth and Bingley and that sort of distance, but no further than that. So the majority of people who have worked in the brewery through the years have come from Keighley.

Cask ale in itself is a living product, it’s intrinsically British. It’s one that you can only really get in a pub. There’s no way to replicate it at home. Cask ale in itself is absolutely beautiful you know, the taste, the depth and all that kind of stuff is absolutely fantastic… it’s a real labour of love.

Over the past 10 years the cask ale category as a whole has declined. We’ve managed to climb our way to the top and we are now the number one produced cask ale in the country. Cask ale is more natural, fresh and organic, it’s kind of artisanally produced and yet it’s always sitting very cheap in comparison to lager … when really cask ale should be more expensive than lager when you look at the ingredients that get put into it.

We use spring water, so the artisanal spring that sits underneath our brewery is unique to us. It has a unique flavour profile based on where it comes from. Beer is 95% water, so it makes a huge difference to the flavour profile of the beer. The hops that we use, they’re heritage hops that are grown and we actively encourage and contract farmers to grow them for us. We use one of the most expensive malts that you can use it’s usually used in the production of whiskies, but again difficult to grow and we contract farmers to do that for us as well because it’s all about doing things the hard way necessarily because we want the product that we want and we never kind of take a step back on the quality.

The independence of being family owned in the brewing industry is becoming rarer and rarer. The family owned independence is a huge thing that we’re very proud of, and it’s that thing that makes us able to do what we do. We had a member of the malting team called Arthur Poulter, he went to World War One and he was a stretcher bearer for the Duke of Wellington Regiment and through the course of the conflict he went back into the field over and over again and I think he saved about 10 men on the stretcher and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Arthur Poulter said that he works at Timothy Taylor’s maltings and it’s like lifting a malt sack onto your shoulder. So we actually have a beer called Poulter’s Porter and it’s got his story and it’s linked to him. He was a very notable employee of Timmy Taylor’s.