Crystal Malt question

[Parva]

I bought some Crystal Malt from my local HBS as I fancied a change from using solely M.O. for once. Beersmith lists differing versions starting at 10l going upto 120l, presumably each one being darker than the last. As there was no mention of this on the bag I bought I took a guess at 20l and formulated the following for a 23l batch :-

Amount Item Type
4.80 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM) Grain
0.40 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 30L (30.0 SRM) Grain
0.10 kg Wheat, Torrified (1.7 SRM) Grain

90 min 25.00 gm Boadicea [7.60 %] (90 min) Hops
90 min 25.00 gm Progress [6.00 %] (90 min) Hops
15 min 15.00 gm Brewer's Gold [4.60 %] (15 min) Hops

I didn't achieve the boil-off I was after and ended up with 27litres at 1051 so I'm very happy with that! I am very happy with the colour, it's Tetley's / John Smith's coloured but Beersmith predicted a much lighter colour. I'm guessing that the crystal is a much darker variety than I had guessed at.

Is there any set sort of standard that crystal comes in generally or is it just a case of suck it and see and adjust accordingly?

[Aleman]

'Standard' Crystal is around 120 EBC or 55-60L/SRM
Light Crystal is 60EBC
And Caramalt is 30EBC
Caragold is lighter still

[Graham]

The colour of crystal malt varies somewhat between suppliers, but "standard" is around 130EBC.

These days light crystal (60 EBC) and dark crystal (300 EBC) are also available from most maltsters.

AOB/Lovibond and IOB/EBC are not directly comparable, but you can roughly halve EBC to give AOB.

Whoops! Beaten to it.

[Parva]

Aha, 120l looks much more like the colour I ended up with, cheers chaps. Can't wait to try this one, the airlock's off like a steam train today with that S04 in.

[steve_flack]

Aha, 120l looks much more like the colour I ended up with,

Are you sure you don't mean 120 EBC?

[Parva]

Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L is what Beersmith calls it and gives it a colour rating of 120 SRM.

[steve_flack]

It's just that if you go to a homebrew show and buy 'Crystal Malt' you'll get 120EBC. I actually wanted to source 120L (around 260EBC) the last time I was buying ingredients and the darkest I could get was 200EBC (around 90L) and it was specifically sold as 'Dark Crystal Malt'. If you've got 120L I want to know where.

[Parva]

I suspect it's probably 120EBC then, all a bit technical for me. All I know is that selecting 120L in Beersmith equates to the correct colour of my beer so I'll just leave it set as is for future brews.

[steve_flack]

Beer colour is tricky to predict as quite a lot of it can be process dependent - an especially important consideration for pale beers. Add to that the common method of calculating colour doesn't track linearly with the real colour... so a number of kludges are nailed on top to fix it.

Another issue is that beers with measured colours of the same value can actually look to be different colours because we see a range of wavelengths and colour is measured at just one.

[Parva]

I appreciate that any beer-making software is only ever going to make an educated guess and don't rely on it entirely. I was hoping for a beer typically around a Tetleys / John Smiths bitter sort of colour and by pure luck and total guess work actually got one so I'm very happy.

[anomalous_result]

so a number of kludges are nailed on top to fix it.

kludges... a technical term? Reminds me of 1st year physics. "What? This root 2 here? Oh... err... yeah... it wouldn't work without it"

[maxashton]

kludge is a mathematical / programming / engineering term. It basically means a hasty sloppy hack job to make something work as intended.