In practice, good home brewing software like BeerSmith will automatically estimate the color of your recipe as you build it, but I think it is still useful to know what is going on under the hood.Ī first iteration at estimating beer color involved simply calculating the Malt Color Units (MCUs) of a recipe. For my money, a nice beer color card is easier to use.Īs a home brewer, I’m very interested in how to estimate the color of my beer for a given recipe in advance of brewing. Ray Daniels describes this method in detail in his chapter on beer color from his book Designing Great Beers, if you are a truly dedicated brewer. I don’t recommend printing an online color card, as the variations in printer color will spoil your measurements.Īnother method involves diluting your beer with distilled water and comparing it to known color standards such as mass produced commercial beer. I recommend purchasing such a guide from your local store. The most popular and easy to use is a beer reference color card, such as the Davidson guide, to do a visual comparison of your beer against standard reference colors. If you don’t have a spectrophotometer handy in your personal laboratory, a number of tools are available to help you measure the color of your beer. In practice the EBC color is approximately 1.97 times the SRM color. The other common method, called the European Brewing Convention (EBC) is measured at the same wavelength but in a smaller 1 cm cuvette. The SRM color is approximately equal to the old lovibond scale in most cases. The SRM color is approximately 10 times the amount of absorbance, which is measured on a logarithmic scale. The SRM color of beer is measured using a ½” glass cuvette measured by a spectrophotometer at a light wavelength of 430nm. It originally used visual comparison, but some 25 years later changed to use a spectrophotometer in a slightly different way than SRM. Separately the Europeans developed another visual system called the European Brewing Convention (EBC). In 1950 the ASBC adopted the Standard Reference Method (SRM) color system. By the mid-20’th century, light spectrophotometer technology was developed. Over time, limitations of the Lovibond were recognized, not the least of which was that it depended upon a person’s vision – which naturally has variations in color perception from person to person. For decades, beer was compared to colored glass standards to determine the Lovibond color, and we still use the term “Degrees Lovibond” extensively today to describe the color of grains. Lovibond in 1883, and used colored slides that were compared to the beer color to determine approximate value. The original lovibond system was created by J.W. The system used to characterize beer color has its origins in the late 1800’s. Today we’ll look at beer color, how its measured, color limitations, and how to estimate the color of a beer recipe. The deep black color and white foam of an Irish Stout, deep copper of a Pale Ale and cloudy light color of a Bavarian Wheat are all within the rainbow we call beer.
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