Well the trouble is that BJCP 2015 really did seem to have gone through the process of "I went to a pub once in London" and not much more than that. It may have been fine for US styles, but the 2015 version was a nonsense for British styles, and AIUI that's also true of most European styles too. Part of it is people just being unaware of how little they know about beer - certainly in general the US beer scene thinks it knows a lot more about British beer than it really does, and in general US commercial attempts at British styles aren't that great IME. But to be fair the 2021 BJCP guidelines are a lot better, although they still haven't quite worked out mild, and haven't caught up with the modern trend towards hazy bitter. Also to be fair, BJCP themselves always emphasise that they are not generic beer style guides, they are intended only for the specific purpose of judging beer competitions.
And yes, I'm just one British drinker. On the other hand aside from homebrewing I have professional involvement with just about all ends of the British beer business, from hop gardens to pub cellars to either side of the bar and (before Covid broke my sense of taste/smell) judging (early stages) of Champion Beer of Britain. And I make regular trips across the pond so have some familiarity with what goes on there. That doesn't mean I know it all - far from it - but I do know a bit. Perhaps most relevantly here, I grew up in Boddington territory so probably over half of all the beer I've ever drunk would be classified as golden ale in some form or other.
The problem is that there's really three completely different beers that get described as golden ales. There's one end of the range of standard bitters where the usual variable amount of crystal disappears to nothing, like Boddington's. Whereas the other end of the crystal spectrum is most common in the Thames Valley between Oxford and London, so tourists tend to think that extreme is the norm. Going back to the 19th century it was normal to just make beer with pale malt, there's a complex mass of culture as to why different regions took to crystal to different degrees in the early 20th century, I suspect the Manchester arsenic poisoning of 1900 led to a demand for pale beer in northern industrial cities as guaranteeing "purity" when their southern counterparts were happy for some crystal to compensate for the loss of body due to "modern" barley varieties and government-imposed ABV reductions in World War I.
So those <4% golden ales go back to the 19th century, whereas the second incarnation developed in southern England in the 1980s, as a response to premium imported lagers. You have to remember that in most of the UK, there's a more-or-less hard ABV limit of 4.5% for cask beer - anything stronger doesn't get the turnover to get through a firkin before it goes off, except in some city centre pubs. So it's kinda notable that of the two benchmarks of that style, Summer Lightning is 5% in cask and Exmoor Gold is 4.5% in cask, 5% bottled - they are strong by British cask standards (although I know at least one brewery that's reduced the strength of their version from 5% to 4.5% just because that's what the market now wants). This is what the guides tend to refer to as "golden ale" because those writing the guides have never been to Manchester at any time in the last 100 years, and it ignores 30+ years of development since, they're stuck in the 1980s. They tend to be pretty classic with their hops - almost always at least some Goldings, maybe a bit of Challenger or something but that's about as exotic as it gets. So I guess it's a modern take on 19th century IPAs.
And then you have what happened when the British cask tradition met Cascade and SNPA, notably with Brendan Dobbin in Manchester and Sean Franklin in Harrogate (North Yorkshire). This third wave of golden ales has gone through the same cycles as in the US as new hop varieties have been bred - starting with Cascade, then going on to some of the other "West Coast" hops, and now onto Citra and other "tropical" hops in worts that are getting hazier. But you don't see much from continental Europe - maybe the odd special gyle in a series of single-hop beers, but most people tried a gyle of Mandarina and pretty quickly figured out that it just doesn't really work.
Boak and Bailey have done some good pieces on how this all evolved :
https://boakandbailey.com/2021/05/the-evolution-of-palenhoppy-ale-in-the-uk/https://boakandbailey.com/2016/03/where-do-beer-ideas-come-from/
and Jeff Alworth on where things stood on the eve of the pandemic :
What’s This? “Juicy Bitter” on Cask? — Beervana (and following)
Something to emphasise is that although you'll often see "citrus" bandied about, it's definitely at the lemon/grapefruit end of the citrus spectrum rather than orange - we have plenty of orange flavours on the bar from yeast and trad beers with First Gold etc, so you tend not to get orange as a primary note even if eg Amarillo does sometimes get used as a secondary, supporting hop.
Also, a lot of the modern ones use a good chunk of NZ hops as well as US - Marble Pint is perhaps the modern benchmark and it uses Lemon Drop, Nelson Sauvin, Dr Rudi, and Citra.
I'd suggest that you play around with hops in the boil a little more - it's no coincidence that it's a traditional "thing", and I think particularly with Fuggles you need to boil them to get the best out of them (bearing in mind vintage variation which is considerable in British hops). The way I look at it is that a piano or string quartet or brass band can all be enjoyable on their own,hing special happens when they come together in an orchestra. Multiple additions bring out depths in hops that single additions can either hide or give too much prominence to.
Typical down south, but it's noticeably more up north, in part due to serving through sparklers. But it's better to think in terms of BU/GU rather than absolute values of IBU - down south it's around 60-75 BU/GU, up north it's maybe 75-90.
Water can be all over the place, the sulphate:chloride ratio has been decreasing in recent years, particularly with New World hops. The only golden rule with water for British beers is that calcium should be at least 100ppm - remember this is heading for cask so you need the yeast to flocc out. I tend to be somewhere in the 130ppm range for Ca with a bit more sulphate than chloride, but it's not something I've ever optimised.
