extract brewing partial boil questions

[donjonson]

I recently made an extract pale ale kit with steeping grains. It was:

extract:
3 lb gold dme
3.3 lb pilsen LME

steeping:
12oz Briess Cara-Pils
1.25lb Honey malt

.5 oz magnum 60 min
1.5 oz amarillo 5 min
1.5 oz amarillo 0 min


So I did a 2 gallon boil and boiled all of the extract for 60 mins. I get the feeling that the finished product was darker than it was intended to be. I really love the beer it tastes great but I have to wonder if the darker color is due to the long boil. Someone told me that I can boil half the extract for the whole time and then add the rest at 15 mins left. With this logic cant I just add all of the extract at 15 min? is there a downside to this? perhaps the hotbreak will not flocculate as much protein leading to cloudy beer and or chill haze? that is the only thing I can think of why not to do this?

any thoughts?

 

[VTBrewer]

How old was the LME? Older LME can get kinda dark.

 

[jonmohno]

Are you forgetting you still need to dilute it with top off water?Or is this after the top off water you decided it was too dark.I tlooks darker in the carboy than a beer glass will. Dme is said to be fairly lighter than liquid. I dont know this from experience.Also late addition is suppose to lighten it up.I didnt think it helped i did it at 10 min. Maybe if you do it at 5 minutes or flameout? extra light dme would have been lighter than the golden dme.

 

[donjonson]

Are you forgetting you still need to dilute it with top off water?Or is this after the top off water you decided it was too dark.I tlooks darker in the carboy than a beer glass will. Dme is said to be fairly lighter than liquid. I dont know this from experience.Also late addition is suppose to lighten it up.I didnt think it helped i did it at 10 min. Maybe if you do it at 5 minutes or flameout? extra light dme would have been lighter than the golden dme.

Yeah the beer has been in bottles for 5 weeks now and is half gone. I would estimate it to be a 15 on the lovibond scale. That seems to dark to me based on the names of these extracts. I know the honey malt is dark but I didn't think it would darken it that much.

 

[VTBrewer]

What temp did you mash at? A higher temperature mash will give you sugars that are less fermentable than a lower temperature one. Your hydrometer can't measure that....

***EDIT***
Ooops. i'm in the wrong thread, this was for another thread about unfermentabels. Making a starter, bottling, and sampling some recent ones.

 

[donjonson]

here is a pic of the beer itself

 

[donjonson]

What temp did you mash at? A higher temperature mash will give you sugars that are less fermentable than a lower temperature one. Your hydrometer can't measure that....

I dont understand? what does final gravity have to do with the color of the beer?

 

[VTBrewer]

Ooops. i'm in the wrong thread, this was for another thread about unfermentabels. Making a starter, bottling, and sampling some recent ones.

 

[jonmohno]

i think the honeymalt and golden contributed to a darker pale ale.Did it specify on the kit the color? you could have just assumed it to be a lighter color before you buying it.

 

[donjonson]

i think the honeymalt and golden contributed to a darker pale ale.Did it specify on the kit the color? you could have just assumed it to be a lighter color before you buying it.

I think your probably right. The recipe does not state a color only IBU ABV OG and FG.

 

[VTBrewer]

Now that i'm off the stove and in the right thread...

I get 9.2 when i put that into my calculator which is generally pretty close. Between calculator error (I didn't write the underlying calculation) eye error, possibly some older extract, there's probably not much that could correct it in the future.

To answer one of your questions in the OP, no you cannot add all your extract at 15 mins (essentially boiling hops in water for 45 mins). Hops need *some* of the sugar for proper utilization. If you search late addition you'll find many thread on it.