Dark Malt in British Mild

In another thread (which you can find here if you're curious) I accused Brewing Classic Styles of providing inauthentic recipes for several styles. I still think there is reason to take the book with a grain of salt, but the example that I thought was the most obvious one, British mild ale, turns out to be more complicated than I originally thought. I decided to start this new thread to describe a bit of research I did and discuss how we think about beer styles.

First, a mea culpa. In the thread I linked to above, I was insistent that British mild ale recipes traditionally relied almost exclusively on crystal malt and sugar for their color, rarely using dark malt (aside from crystal malt). I wrote that mostly in reliance on a Ron Pattinson post that states: "Most Milds got their colour from sugar, usuall a combination of No. 3 invert and caramel. It's rare to find any malt darker than crystal in Mild." As we'll see below, this is a true statement, but I drew too strong a conclusion from it. Dark malt may have been rare, but not so rare that it doesn't pop up quite a bit in the brewing records. If you want to use dark malt in your mild ale, you have plenty of historical precedent.

The following mild ale recipes (which come from Pattinson books, although not his Mild! book, which I will have to buy one of these days) all contain dark malt:

1905 Whitbread XK (2.94% brown malt—also contained invert sugar)
1915 Noakes XXX (1.54% black malt—also contained invert sugar—NOTE Pattinson states that despite the XXX designation, this may have been a Burton ale, not a mild)
1918 Courage X Ale (1.69% black malt—also contained invert sugar)
1918 Truman X (1.13% black malt—no sugar)
1918 Whitbread MA (several recipes with varying degrees of brown malt, from 8.82% to 10.73%—also contained invert sugar)
1919 Barclay Perkins X Ale (4.19% brown malt, 0.25% roasted barley—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)
1919 Courage X Ale (1.4% black malt—also contained invert sugar)
1919 Tetley X (2.04% chocolate malt—also contained brown sugar)
1919 Tetley X1 (3.03% chocolate malt—also contained brown sugar)
1919 Truman X (0.56% black malt—also contained invert sugar)
1947 Boddington XX (0.39% black malt—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)
1950 Lees Best Mild (0.88% black malt—also contained invert sugar)
1951 Boddington XX (0.7% black malt—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)
1952 Shepherd Neame SM (11.03% black malt—also contained invert sugar—NOTE Pattinson speculates this is a "special mild" based on the name but I wonder if it might have been a different style of beer, given its 25 SRM and its absurdly large amount of black malt, more black malt than several of Sherpherd Neame's stouts contain)
1955 Lees Best Mild (0.88% black malt, 3.67% chocolate malt, 1.84% brown malt—also contained invert sugar)
1958 Lees Best Mild (7.29% brown malt—also contained invert sugar)
1959 Ushers (Trowbridge) X Mild (1.74% black malt—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)
1959 Watneys XX Mild (4.2% roast barley—also contained invert sugar and caramel color—and ginger!)
1963 Lees Best Mild (6.98% brown malt—also contained invert sugar)
1966 Boddington XX (0.73% black malt—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)
1969 Truman LM (3.6% roast barley—also contained invert sugar and caramel color)

A few notes about these recipes. First, I am simply reporting the percentages of dark malt that Pattinson's homebrew versions of these recipes call for. The same goes for "invert sugar" and "caramel color"—Pattinson often translates proprietary brands of sugar into those categories, so what I've included here represents Pattinson's best guess. But in any case there would have been some kind of dark sugar in the vast majority of these recipes.

Second, World War I may have been an outlier in that sugar was harder to get (thanks to the U-boats). Perhaps those 1918 and 1919 recipes should be discounted somewhat, since dark malt may have been the only realistic option. However, obviously there were no U-boats by the 50s and 60s.

Third and most importantly, this is not a representative sample of mild recipes! I have cherry-picked these examples by way of demonstrating that plenty of legitimate breweries used dark malt in mild from time to time. To do so I had to flip past a lot more recipes, including a lot of recipes from the same breweries listed above, that contained no dark malt (other than crystal malt) whatsoever. In fact I remain convinced that dark malt was a pretty rare ingredient in British mild. Just not as rare as I had thought.

Fourth, you'll note that all but one of these recipes includes invert sugar, and the one that doesn't was brewed at the tail end of a war that cut Britain off from its overseas colonies and trading partners. In a way I think Zainasheff's real sin was omitting sugar from the recipe. Apart from the one exception noted above, I struggled to find a single example of a 20th century mild brewed without sugar. (Sugar was not nearly so common an ingredient in the 19th century, when mild ale was often quite pale in color.) So if your mild doesn't have sugar in it, it certainly seems that you have strayed from the 20th century British tradition (at least based on the brewery logs Pattinson has been able to obtain).

Fifth, although these recipes all contain dark malt, you'll note that a lot of them contain relatively little of it. Only the 1952 Shepherd Neame SM, which honestly doesn't look like a mild to me, contains enough black malt to dominate the character of the beer.

So anyway, where I thought there might only be one or two examples of dark malt in mild recipes, I have found quite a few. I wrote this post to correct my mistake and hopefully start a conversation about how we think about beer styles, which I'll continue tomorrow.