My beers always turn out darker

So far 3 APAs, 2 IPAs, and 1 Belgian Red that I have brewed have turned out darker than the recipe has indicated it would.

My first thought was mash/sparge temps. If I had a thermometer that was not reading correctly I might be over-heating my mash and extracting tannins. Thermometer calibration to freezing and boiling water shows only .5 to 1 degree deviation to the high side.

My next thought was water chemistry. My tap water is off a municipal well and I have used a water report to settle on a 50/50 mix of RO/Tap with a little added Lactic acid to bring my mash pH into a good 5.3-5.4 zone. The likelyhood that I need to add brewers salts or gypsum has crossed my mind, but for all intents and purposes this mix should be adequate for an "average" water profile.

From here I am not sure where else to look for my problem. My APAs look like brown ale, my IPAs look like Porters, and my Belgian Red looked almost black.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or ideas on where this extra color is coming from?

Do you use any extract in the boil? Ray Daniels wrote a good bit on this in "Designing Great Beers"

Here is a link:
Designing Great Beers

Are these kit recipes? Personally designed ones? This sounds like a big discrepancy. How strong is your boil? Any chance you're scorching the wort and adding color that way.

I'm assuming these beers are all past the primary stage? They appear a lot darker than they actually are while in primary.

These are all-grain brews, no extract.

I usually follow other's recipe's to a T unless I need to sub an ingredient my LHBS does not carry but always make sure to keep to the recipe's SRM and Lovibond measurements per ingredient.

I always get a rolling boil, and have never seen any charred or dark wort on the bottom of my kettle.

The color I am referencing is always color in a glass. I always use the same Sam Adams pint glass to drink all my homebrews.

Too vigorous of a boil will create too many Maillard reactions which contribute to darker color beers. Try backing of the boil so it is just a steady rolling boil, not too crazy.

Electric?

i have this same problem alot of the time. next brew will be in a bigger pot. more surface area will help getting a better boil i think.

I boil in a 30 gallon stainless kettle, natural gas burner.

I will back off the heat and just keep a rolling boil for the next brew and see if that makes any difference.

If you up your grain bill across the board to account for lower efficiency you may be adding too much of the non fermetable or low fermentable grains. IE the steeping grains. If you have lower mash efficiency you might try to add just a higher percentage of base malt and less of the color malts.

What does your OG look like after? You could have a more concentrated brew/higher efficiency, are you getting less than you expect? That would be my guess.

If your water is like mine and has a high PH (7.2 or so in my case) then you may be experiencing this problem like me.

I now add 1/4 lb of acidulated malt to all my brews to reduce the PH of the mash into the mid 5s.

You could also lighten the PH of your HLT water with various food grade acids.

Neither of these affect the taste.

To be certain you need to get a decent PH meter (around $60) and test during the mash. You'll have to cool down your sample and test, thyen you can add things to it. Adding a bit of acidulated malt corrects my problem. It may work for you too.

This seems to have lightened me up a bit!

I obsessed about this a year or two ago and my GABF friends started calling me Lovibond becuase of it. Bottom line is that color isn't that important to the taste or body, but is an aesthetic thing and is most noticed when trying to copy commercial beers. I got out of that habit except for very few beers. I bought Designing Great Beers and found that I could use guidelines to create my own recipes. No preconceived notions and no obvious color departure...

My 2 cents.

BannonB

Can i ask where you are getting your recipes from, i mean what software do are they generated from?
I used to you Hopville :smack: you cant adjust the EBC of the grains, so all my pale ales looked like Ambers.... now use Beersmith, problem solved.

FourSeasonAngler said:

The color I am referencing is always color in a glass. I always use the same Sam Adams pint glass to drink all my homebrews.

Click to expand...

I would say the culprit is your pint glass. I would suspect your homebrew becomes depressed when poured into a glass of this caliber and the color will slightly darken. For best results try pouring it into a custom made pint glass specifically for your homebrews or a pint glass that sports the colors of a brewery that is not slime adams.