The legend of kettle caramelisation in Scottish beer (2)

Following on from my previous post on the subject, this snippet about Wright’s brewery in Perth caught my eye:

The brewing copper is one of the traditional direct-fired open vessels—one of the few of this type remaining in use today, and worthy of a visit by young brewers whose experience is limited to the modern welded enclosed steam-coil heated copper.
—Brewers’ Guardian October 1960 (reprinted in Journal of the Scottish Brewing Archive vol. 5 (2003))

So by 1960 at the latest, a direct fired copper was already an anachronism and something you showed to young brewing students to show them how things were done in the past.

Previously to this, English breweries would presumably have been using the same direct-heat technology, but we never hear anything about caramelisation being a characteristic of English beer.