Too dark?

[Batmang]

My friends and I are currently brewing our first batch of beer.

Can of "wheat" extract
1 pound of wheat DME
tube of hefeweizen yeast

Anyway, the beer is currently in the fermenting stage, has been for about 12 days. We are planning on bottling Sunday. Everything up to this point has gone how I have read it should go except.......

The beer is dark! We were going for hefewiezen obviously, but the beer in the carboy is the color of an amber beer or even a brown ale!

Is this bad? Any ideas what could cause this? A Hefeweizen should be light and golden. I guess we'll find out how it tastes soon, but the color thing threw us off.

Thanks!

 

[Brewsmith]

It will look darker in the carboy. Also, liquid extracts tend to darken as they age. Try to find the freshest extract you can find.

 

[Batmang]

Thanks for the reply! That is good to know. I basically told my friend the same thing and not to worry, but then him worrying made me worry. Blah.

 

[Brewsmith]

Also, boiling will darken the color as well. There are several threads about late extract additions in the boil. Basically you just add a portion of the extract in the beginning with the bittering hops and then add the rest of the extract near the end just to sterilize it. Use the search feature and you find a bunch of threads.

 

[rijtjeshuis]

I've heard this a lot about wheat beers... Did you use LME or DME?

I haven't yet found an LME that is a really light wheat. Usually I can only get Bavarian Wheat in LME, which gives you a color like a light dunkelweizen or the Schneider-Weisse Hefe. This is way to dark for a Wit or most wheat brews. I've accidentally brewed a wit with it once.

Muntons makes a DME that's very light, which I needed to use to make a witbier or American wheat beer.

If your recipe calls for LME and you need to use DME, there's lots of sites that give you the calculation, but in general... 3.3 lb LME = 3.0 lb DME.

 

[Zalf]

Take a gravity reading now so you can take another Sunday to make sure you won't have bottle bombs.