acidrain23

Recipes 

So, I brewed the following this past weekend:

For three gallons:
50% 3 lbs extra light DME
16.7% 1 lb flaked barley
16.7% 1 lb 2 row
16.7% 1 lb TF&S Pale Crystal (20L)

Yeast: Nottingham

Hops:

.5 oz palisades 15M
.5 oz palisades 10M
.5 oz palisades 5M
1.5 oz palisades Flameout
.5 oz simcoe Flameout + Orange Zest

Dry Hop: 1 oz Amarillo (whole hops)

Predicted OG: 1.064
Predicted FG: 1.018
Predicted ABV: 5.9%
Predicted IBU’s: 24

Everything went well and I hit my SG spot on. However, the brew came out much darker than anticipated. Its a rich mahogany color. I don't really care all that much- so long as the beer tastes good! However, I would like to know which of my ingredients is making the beer so dark so I can compensate in future brews. Tastybrew origianlly predicted a golden yellow color. Any thoughts?

The barley flakes and two row were mashed for 60M at 155F, the crystal was steeped for 30M.

duboman

Recipes 

The crystal will add some color but most likely the extract. Any type of extract will generally produce a darker beer because there can always be some caramelizing that occurs during the boil besides, the software always provides an assumed average based upon the known ingredients-RDWHAHB!

Sippin37

Recipes 

Yep, and you can always try doing some late malt additions when boiling the wort. Basically throw in like 20% of the malt extract at the beginning of the boil and the remainder with 15 min remaining in the boil. This should help keep the color lighter. You might need to tweak the amount of hops pitched then because when I do this in Beersmith software the IBU's jump up a little with late malt extract additions. Basically the lower the gravity of the boiling wort the more alpha acids will be extracted. I don't know if this has technically been proven or not, but Beersmith does automatically adjust for it. Cheers!

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