My beer is darker than it is supposed to be

[Gauthier]

Hey guys Gauthier from France here, i made a batch of SMASH CITRA about 5 weeks ago, tasted it last week end and it seems that the beer is darker than it is supposed to be.
When i bottled it the color was way lighter than it is now. What is weird is it doesn't have any bad taste (no cardboard flavor or anything) but it taste actually pretty nice (lychee flavor from the Citra hops)
this is my recipe :

Pale ale malt, 5-9 ebc 5kg
1h at 66 degrees for 60 minutes (150.8F)
Mash out for 10 minutes at 78 degrees (172 F)
Boil for 60 minutes
Citra hops 10g for 60 minutes
35g for 45 minutes
35g flame out at 85 degrees C (185F)
120g dry hop for 4 days
Yeast : m44
constant temperature around 20 to 21 degres for 21 days then cold crash for 2 and half days betweem 3 to 5 degres.
And then the picture you saw was after 12 days of fermentation in bottles (7g of sugar per litre)

For the sugar, I didn't use dextrose i used an Organic Unrefined Cane Sugar

approximately 1.057
approximately 1.016

The lighning was quiet bad on the second photo (night time) so i took a second one by day light

If you guys could figure out and help me what happened that would be great !

Thanks !

 

[Gnomebrewer]

Oxidation will make your beer darker. Only severe oxidation will make it taste like cardboard. There was a thread going around recently where some brewers purged the head of some bottles with CO2 before capping and compared with regular bottling. The purging prevented the darkening, but IIRC didn't significantly change the flavour.

 

[Gauthier]

Do you think it will get worse overtime ?
Next time i will try putting a bit of fermenting yeast ...hopefully it will help a bit.

 

[thehaze]

So the pictures you posted are not saying much, as you did not use the exact same glass or test tube to take pictures of the beer from fermenter and then form the bottle. Colour will be darker in a glass when compared to a narrow hydrometer tube, as the volume of liquid and the depth is different. So it is quite normal that yellow in a hydrometer tube would be deep golden, amber-ish in a wide glass.

Also, you used Pale Ale malt, which is rated at 5-9 EBC. That is Vienna malt territory and your beer will turn deep gold, amber - it matters also how much water you used to get your final volume, etc. How much or how hard you boiled, etc.

But what you have in the glass, could easily be oxidation. The colour shift is pretty steep, so even if it is not heavily oxidised now, it will at some point. From this point, it will only go downwards.

 

[TurnipGreen]

Quick! Drink it all and make another batch!

Looks like oxidation. I had a batch last year do exactly that. It didn’t taste bad, but the hops didn’t quite pop as much as they were supposed to and it degraded over time. I never got cardboard, it just got more and more bland

 

[TurnipGreen]

Oh and I’m pretty sure mine came from a bubble in the racking cane. It wasn’t there long at all, but I’m convinced it’s the culprit.