What can cause a colour change in beer?

Hey all,

Last weekend I bottled a brew into .5L Grolsch swingtops that had been cleaned out in a bleach solution, rinsed with a jet washer and then sanitized with Iodophor. The recipe made a basic red ale (65% 2-row, 30% Munich, 5% Carared) and it bottled up fine.

In some of the bottles, even after a week, we've noticed that the beer is a lighter shade if held to the light. There is active yeast and the beer is nicely carbonated, just the colour is different from the other bottles of the same brew. My uneducated tongue can't really taste anything "off" with the beer either but haven't tried them side by side with what I'd consider the normal beer from the batch.

Can residual bleach be the culprit? Can the colour of the beer be affected by less bleach than would hurt the yeast or affect the flavour?

Joe

Just sounds like your yeast is coming out of suspension? It can vary a little from bottle to bottle, the rate at which it drops out but they should happen roughly in the same time frame. Or maybe different thicknesses of glass bottle? They can vary quite a lot even from within a case, depending on who made them.

judging beer color is a very subject and relative thing, unless you do a scientific comparison its impossible to know if the color is really different. there is a whole chapter on this in "designing great beers". I doubt its the bleach you should definitely taste/smell it before it would have any impact on the color.

I'll check my own stock tonight and report, this was the observation of one of the guys I brew with. They're very impatient and start drinking the beers after a week in the bottle. He brought one of the suspect beers in to work to show me but didn't bring a control (it tastes good in a coffee cup).

green grolsch bottles?

I'd be more inclined to think one of your bottles is just a lighter shade of green or the glass isn't as thick.

I checked my own stock of these beers and couldn't find a beer that was a different shade. So I went back to the source and he provided. Here is a link to some pics...
BeerMystery

I'm a bit baffled, the lighter beer has a different aroma to it and a bit crisper taste, but we haven't brewed anything this pale yet.

We bottled 4 batches of beer that day but one was much darker, like a nut brown and the other three were red ales from the same wort just using different yeasts or dry hops.

Has anyone else experienced this level of bottle to bottle colour variation? I'm still leaning toward the bleach rinsing but they were rinsed after this with iodophor so one would think that the residual bleach would mix with the iodophor and contaminate all the bottles. I suppose these ones could be the last ones bottled.

Oh well, at the end of the day it still tastes like beer and goes down the same holes.

If you didn't thoroughly mix your priming solution you may have had more of that in some of the bottles.

nathan said:

If you didn't thoroughly mix your priming solution you may have had more of that in some of the bottles.

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I don't know if simple dilution can explain it as all the bottles are very carbonated. I added 145 grams of dextrose to about 2 cups of boiled water and siphoned the beer onto it. This colour change was observed in 4 - 500ml grolsch bottles so at most that's a 1:4 dilution of the sugar solution which I don't think would impact the colour this radically.

I'm still leaning toward a chemical reaction, possibly involving the bleach residue.

It's not the bleach. The beer would reek of bandaids so much that it would be undrinkable. Plus it would take so much bleach to make it change color like that it would be flat and poisonous.

To me it looks like some have been diluted, plain and simple. A possible scenario would be topping up the last dregs of the bottling bucket with more water to fill the last four bottles all the way. Take a hydrometer reading on the two beers, I'll bet that they're different readings.