Beard: check. Checks: check. Infuriating area of obsession and pseudo-expertise… Oh, you know the score .

There’s nothing wrong with being an artisan. Let’s get that out of the way from the get-go. Why would there be? A dedication to an art or craft is nothing but laudable, 100 per cent. But much as we love, say, a French lace-maker whose been at to it for seven generations, by some curious quirk, we’re totally turned off by that latter-day phenomena, the neo-artisan. You know the type – given up their job in oil futures in Singapore come back to the “old country” and opened a place selling gin made from small-batch almonds or hand-painted chocolate fish or something. These self-declared artisans go about making a song and dance, ruining the small pleasures: it’s all over-egged esotericism, awkward silences and the grim whiff of someone’s own sense of superiority. Read on to meet the most amusing of the bunch.

Chocolate was once made by avuncular fat men with large factories and top hats. It was a sort of rule. Chocolate being a simple pleasure after all, something to be enjoyed in an overflowing bath, as per the old Flake ad. But then the 2000s happened and suddenly the chocolate man was no longer festively plump, he was rangy with a plaid shirt, beard and liked to egest such phrases as “flavour lab co-creation”, and exchange cocoa information on a cloud-based database called “Cropster”. These men wear their eco-credentials heavily, have a penchant for laboratories, and have never knowingly emitted an orgasmic “mmmm” while eating raw cacoa in a bath tub full of Radox and more fool them.

He started young, sipping his dad’s Bass outside the pub. Then it was one of those kits for Christmas when he was 15 with the big bottle and all those tubes. And yeast. Lots and lots of yeast. It’s a living thing, you know, yeast? Did you know that? Well if you didn’t know that, you would if you were in sixth form with him. But you probably didn’t as you avoided him like the plague. Now he has a house in Hampstead and a Porsche. Still wears the beanie, though, too. But at least when he sold his microbrewery to Grolsch, they promised they would keep the BadgerVille name and maybe some of the staff.

Etsy is not just the place for kooky embroidered cushions, elk horn dreamcatchers and crocheted baby sandals, no sirree! Etsy is the future. Any home-crafting entrepreneur will tell you that. You call it “waste”, they call it “an opportunity”. Some might say these plucky artisans are only selling on this online jumble sale because they failed to make it in the real fashion world – you can only do so many internships, Dave –  but that is to totally-not-geddit. They have a radically different mindset, that’s all. It’s nothing to do with rejection. As you can see by those slogan T-shirts they have up at the moment: “Make Empathy Great Again”, “Dior Not War” and “SeaWorld Sucks”. Those bosses don’t know what they are missing.

“It’s rust what you want to watch out for, mate,” they will say to you when you randomly find them in your kitchen, fingering your tableware. They came with a friend of a friend to the party and now they are explaining why that six-set from Debenhams won’t do the business. Still, that is a nice tattoo on their arm. He does seem a bit too proud of those muscles, but then if you’d bashed out that many skillet bread knives, you would have a bulging quadriceps, too. Mate, do you think you can close that cutlery drawer now?

“Drink More Gin!” “Home Is Where The Gin Is”, “Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin” – these are some of the expostulations you might hear from your (over)-friendly purveyor of small-batch gin. You would be excited, too, if you had spent all afternoon doing “tastings” for Alan’s big birthday. But whatever you do, don’t make any mention of the fact he is wearing a dickie bow and a waistcoat. And, yes, he will sometimes refer to his house as “the bar”. Just suck it, and the G&T, up – with ice and a sprig of rosemary.