At Timothy Taylor’s brewery, everything feels perfectly normal – full of life and as though the world is at peace. Soft summer light lends a warm glow to the olive-green livery that adorns the many brewery buildings, while voluminous steam rises with fervour from the stainless-steel chimney at the heart of this sprawling campus, tucked behind a hill in the town of Keighley, West Yorkshire.

Inside it's slightly less calm, as a multitude of brewers go about their tasks with both care and full of intent. Brewing vessels are cleaned and prepped, while bucket after bucket of whole leaf Golding’s hops are added to the boil kettle, filling every cavity of this space with an intense, zesty lemon aroma.

Further down the line, hundreds upon hundreds of firkins are filled and racked with beers that many would consider to be household names. Beers with names like Boltmaker, Knowle Spring, and, of course, the most famous of them all: Landlord.

In the boardroom I meet the brewery’s chief executive of the past decade, Tim Dewey. An American, Tim talks about how he moved here after meeting his wife-to-be on a train to Cardiff. He also tells us about his background in spirits, working with multinational brands including Drambuie and Smirnoff, even alluding to the fact he may well be responsible for the launch of Smirnoff Ice in the United Kingdom.

As it happens, when it comes to managing one of the most storied, and not to mention well-respected family breweries in the country, this kind of experience is valuable indeed. It turns out that Timothy Taylor’s is thriving, to the point where it is cash rich, with £8m in the bank, saved in case of a particularly rainy day.

It’s refreshing to hear, antithesis to the constant news of struggle, hardship and brewery closures. News like Asahi closing the Meantime brewery and moving production to Fuller’s, Black Sheep being bought out of administration by an investment firm, and Adnams admitting to its own financial struggles. This is not a happy time in the long history of British brewing.

We discuss the beer market for several minutes, but then Tim mentions something that causes me to sit up and pay extra attention, something he refers to as “the insanity of cask beer”.

Picking up a framed letter from the mantelpiece behind him – one that’s stacked high with various awards and accolades for Taylor’s beers – he begins to read. It was a letter from the then purchasing manager for the Wetherspoon pub chain informing the brewery that it would no longer be stocking its beer, because the price was not low enough to meet its stocking requirements.

Tim then reads the reply, written by his predecessor, Charles Dent, informing the pub chain that the reason Timothy Taylor’s is priced at what some may consider to be a premium, is because of its quality. At the time it was something that Dent refused to compromise on, and it seems that it is an attitude also instilled into Tim and may well be the root of this brewery’s apparent continued success. 

The “insanity” Tim refers to, is in part a tirade against the category’s constant race to the bottom. But I also detect some frustration, a feeling I can empathise with, that cask is not valued by British drinkers to the extent that it should be.

A confession: I am not a believer that the notion premiumisation will save the cask beer category. I believe that for cask beer to succeed now and in the future, it must be considered democratically. This includes price, where beer that is more expensive to make should be sold at a higher rate, and vice versa. But also, I feel that holding it up to the parapet and declaring that it is somehow better than other styles or those served via different methods of dispense is the wrong approach.

It is just beer, and should be treated as the most normal, ordinary thing in the world. What should be celebrated is how crucial it is to the formation, and indeed, celebration, of British gastronomic culture. Log on to any beer news site, or social media forum, and someone will tell you what is wrong with cask beer, before suggesting how they might fix it. It’s too expensive, it’s too cheap, the quality isn’t good enough, not enough women are drinking it, not enough young people are drinking it, it has an image problem.

Tim Dewey, however, doesn’t seem to find these particular issues a challenge to his own brand, so how has Timothy Taylor’s and brands like Landlord succeeded where others have failed?

Perhaps it's because his approach to cask beer is a democratic one: make a product to as high a standard as possible, and then sell it for a price that you consider to be fair. This being a democracy means you don’t have to agree with him that it is fair. However, sitting later on with a pint of Boltmaker in the pub that is this beer’s namesake, the Boltmakers Arms, I find nothing to complain about in terms of either quality or price. Here, in this glorious little pub, with a lovely pint of beer, well, it just feels like the most normal thing in the world.