So the guidelines suggest one thing, and then judges ignore it and hand out gold medals? That sounds like a problem with the judging process ignoring the guidelines - or judges not knowing enough about the style to judge it appropriately. But hopefully as things evolve, people get more experience and they know what to look for.
Whereas I'm struggling to contain the expletives at how &^%$ing clueless the US can be about British beer. Seriously - I have never seen a British recipe with 27% crystal, yet you're trying to hold it up as a benchmark?
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Who gives a damn what judges think who have never sat in a British pub (or at best, a London tourist gaff), when the recipes of actual British brewers are readily available? You could take Fuller's as an example - their beers are a benchmark of the Thames Valley style which is relatively crystal heavy by British standards, but we have
their actual brewbooks saying they use 7.2% crystal. And that's just one regional style - compare with
the definitive Manchester bitter which is essentially a pale malt/Goldings SMaSH with no crystal whatsoever.
Just
looking through Ron Pattinson's recipes since June from actual British brewers we have :
1959 Fullers Nourishing Stout (2.65% ABV) - 7.4% crystal, 37% sugar, 7.4% maize
1964 Eldridge Pope Double Stout (3.2%) - 15.7% crystal 60, 12.2% sugar, 5.2% lactose
1962 Clarke 1/5 Nobby Brown Ale (2.84%) - 0% crystal, 23% sugar, 6.6% maize
1946 Barclay Perkins KK (bottling) (3.9%) - 4.8% crystal, 15.7% sugar
1958 William Younger No. 3 Scotch Ale (3.97%) - 0% crystal, 5.1% sugar, 30.8% maize
1958 William Younger Brown Ale (3.44%) - 0% crystal, 11.5% sugar, 30.8% maize
1959 Watneys Dairy Maid Sweet Stout (2.91%) - 0% crystal, 22.3% sugar
1956 Tennant's Gold Label (11.05%) - 0% crystal, 12.6% sugar, 18.4% maize
1952 Shepherd Neame SXX (4.37%) - 0% crystal, 2.6% sugar
1948 Lees Bitter (3.7%) - 0% crystal, 10.8% sugar
1961 Thomas Usher P 1/4 (3.9%) - 0% crystal, 22.9% sugar, 6.7% maize
1939 Boddington IP (4.56%) - 0% crystal, 7.6% sugar, 20.4% maize
1963 Lees Strong Ale (7.28%) - 2.2% crystal, 18.2% sugar, 6.6% maize
1964 Truman P2 (3.84%) - 1.5% crystal, 9.1% sugar, 4% maize
1957 Lees Export (4.89%) - 4.6% crystal, 15.9% sugar, 6.8% maize
I should have made the cut-off 2 months exactly, which would have knocked off those last three recipes!
It's a random set of recipes that I'm not claiming is definitive but you get the general idea, in general crystal is used sparingly if at all - obviously crystal would feature more heavily in a collection of Thames Valley Bests from the 1980s. But doesn't a 27% crystal beer just look freaking weird in that company? Yet you hold it out as representative of British brewing!
Ron is on a post-WWII kick at the moment which wasn't the happiest of times for British brewing, what with high taxation, rationing and burgeoning corporatism, but it all looks pretty familiar to a British brewer. OK, you seldom see beers under 3.8% these days, and adjunct use was particularly high; CAMRA's influence has seen adjunct use decline but 6-10% is still pretty common.
So what's going on? Why do US brewers think that British beers need so much more crystal than UK commercial brewers?
Some of it is to do with the availability of ingredients. One reason British brewers seem to have started using crystal in the 20th century was because modern high-yielding barley didn't have the rich flavour of traditional varieties like Chevallier. Even the flavour of something like Maris Otter doesn't compare to Chevallier, and US domestic barleys are blander still - and UK maltsters tend to kiln their malts a little more than their equivalents elsewhere in the world. I suspect that kilning ultimately comes back to that folk memory of Chevallier defining what is "normal" to the British palate. So I get that US brewers used a bit more crystal to compensate for bland US malts in the days when UK malts were hard to get - but there's no excuse now.
In a similar vein, US brewers tend to throw in crystal without appreciating the need to balance it with sugar to dry out the beer - note how only the Eldridge Pope milk stout above has more crystal than sugar. Whilst attitudes to adjuncts have changed a lot in the last 20 years (and tastes have changed as well), all those classic beers have significant amounts of adjunct in them, increasing fermentability, drying it out, and contributing Maillard flavours. You can't look at crystal without looking at invert sugar as its essential partner.
I get the impression that US crystal is less flavoursome than the British equivalent, although I don't have any direct experience with it, so that might explain why more gets used.
Yeast. Historically US brewers tried to make British beers with high-attenuating yeasts like Chico, and then tried to "put the sweetness back" with crystal and ended up with a horrible mess that bore no resemblance to real British beer. Now that lower-attenuating British yeasts are widely available, there's no excuse not to use them.
But there does seem to be a deeper "problem", that US brewers think that British beer is just a lot sweeter than it actually is, and so use crystal to try and match that. Again there's various reasons from what I can tell.
Part of it is the "tourist effect" - London/Oxford/Stonehenge pretty much maps out the heart of the region of crystal-heavy beers, whereas tourists tend not to go to the industrial cities where the taste is for drier beers with less/no crystal. And the beers of the northern cities are less geared for export - Leeds was utterly dominated by Tetley, which was bought by Carlsberg for their pubs and had no great interest in exporting the beer, they demolished the brewery instead. Manchester has several smaller family breweries which are more focussed on selling into their pub estates.
So although huge amounts of eg Lees MPA are drunk on draught, you seldom see them in eg UK supermarkets, let alone in the export market. But it's a good expression of modern British bitter using second-line US hops (Liberty & Mt Hood). You could view something like Track Sonoma as an update on Boddington's using Centennial etc - it's a modern classic but seldom gets to London let alone export markets. Both are a world away from the Thames Valley beers. Instead you guys get what the big companies want to sell which seems to be mostly stuff like Hobgoblin which I find undrinkably sweet, and not at all representative of British beer, but it seems to be reasonably popular across the pond.
Another problem seems to be that visitors end up drinking cask ale in London pubs that don't condition it properly - Landlord in particular suffers from this, I've had pints of it that were sickly sweet from unconverted priming sugar, when it should be taut and dry. The general standard of cellarmanship in London (with some notable exceptions) is a national embarrassment and it doesn't help people get the right idea of what cask is meant to taste like.
So there's no "hate" for crystal - it's just an ingredient, how weird is it to hate an ingredient? But we do get fed up with the opinions of US judges being held up as some kind of proof that high %ages of crystal are "authentic" in British-style beers, when there's no evidence for such %ages being used by actual British brewers.
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