Tertiary fermentation - effects on color?

I've got an Irish Red sittin' in secondary that I've been planning on bottling this weekend. It's a little dark - definitely due in part to the concentrated boil - and my friend suggested that it might lighten up given a week or two in tertiary. Any suggestions?

hmmmmm.....

I can't say for certian since I've never used a tertiary, but for the life of me I can't understand how the beer would possibly get lighter in color. If anything it would likely appear to get darker.

I underlined "appear" because what your eye perceives is light bouncing back from the beer. When there is a lot of yeast in suspension, the beer looks cloudy, but also lighter in color (this is because the yeast reflects light back to you.)

As the beer sits and rests, that yeast settles to the bottom of the fermenter, meaning there are less particles in the beer to catch the light. This causes your beer to look darker.

Have you ever noticed after racking to the secondary that the beer slowly settles, and the clear beer at the top of the fermenter is a richer, darker color? I would expect this to happen further in a tertiary fermenter before I would expect it to get lighter in color.

One more thought: the more volume of beer you are looking at, the darker it appears. Example: beer in the fermenter looks dark, beer in the siphon line looks light, beer in the bottle/glass looks somewhere in the middle.

Once you have a pint of this in front of you, it will look lighter in color simply because you are not staring into the depths of a large vessel of it.

Anyway, my $0.02.

-walker

If you are not in any hurry to bottle it- throw it in a tertiary and see what happens.

The only reason I've heard of doing a ter. fermentaion (thus far) is if you have fruit or something in the secondary and want to let some of the fruities settle out.

Give it a shot!

I've only done one tertiary, and that was Janx' Hop Rod Rye clone. He did it to get the beer off of dry hops and let it mellow a bit. IIRC, it didn't lighten in color, but it was a deep straw-golden color to begin with.

Go for it. The only problem that i could forsee is further exposure to oxygen and light when siphoning and resting in the carboy.