Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today sees the return of The Hater, as Hannah Williams takes on the dubious rebranding of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, which has successfully managed to piss off people across the political spectrum. Has looksmaxxing gone too far? Is Gen Z somehow to blame? Has Timothy Taylor gone ~woke, as the right-wing press have claimed? Or is it our obsession with southern European lager? Read on to find out. Note that today’s article is paywalled. To read it, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Subscribing will give you full access to our back catalogue and ensures that we can continue to pay our contributors fairly.
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Close-up ready, the landlord faces the viewer, one hand laid flaccid on the beer pump, the other thrusting forwards a pint glass. His hair is Anatolian-fresh, his beard dyed dark, his smile wide and fixed, the visible sliver of teeth like a zip forced open. The overall effect is one of smarm but also quiet desperation, as if he possesses an unceasing readiness to serve the demands of content. As it happens, he needs to: as of last month, he became the mascot of the UK’s top selling cask beer: Timothy Taylor’s Landlord.
The transformation was swift, all-pervasive and roundly despised, with the brand’s social account inundated with scathing comments. I was taken aback with revulsion when I first saw this vile interloper, a sentiment echoed by pretty much all the pub staff I have asked about it (one told me they had asked the brewery if they could keep the old pump clip; the answer was no).
‘the new Landlord seems to embody exactly the decade-out-of-date aesthetic of a right winger who would angrily level an accusation of woke-gone-mad, a middle-aged influencer who posts AI Tommy Shelby Reels inciting violence against RNLI volunteers’
Much of the backlash against the new Landlord was due to the esteem in which people held his predecessor. The old mascot – a rugby-shirt-wearing guy with a widow’s peak, mid-pulling a pint – had an altogether different vibe, you see. His eyes averted as if in conversation with a local, he was the type to have heard all the gossip and never let it slip, his wry, gentle smile suggesting that beneath his rugged exterior lay a benevolent soul (for me, he brought to mind the manager of a now-closed pub in Crystal Palace whose craggy masculinity hid a love for queer poetry nights).
