EBC values

[MikeG]

I fancied a bark beer for christmas so I played around with Beer Engine and plugged in 4kg of Marris Otter and 400g of Roasted Barley (9.1% - Worcester Hop Shop recommend a max of 10%) and BE predicted an EBC of 165. Wikipedia (yeah, yeah I know you can't trust anything there) has a diagram for EBC's and their colour which shows Irish dry stout (Guiness) as 47. Would my beer, at 165, be like a black hole and totally absorb me when I cross its event horizon?

[Morten]

165 EBC is as black as they come

As far as I remember, 100 EBC is black - as in no light will penetrate.

[WallyBrew]

Does this help?

In the following pictures 49 is coca cola. 36.8, 24.5, 12.3, 6.1 are all coca cola diluted 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8.
I think the al;e was London Pride and the lager was something cheap and forgettable.

The readings are as EBC read using a 10mm cell and a spectrophotometer at 430nm.




Ascending order



Random order

[DeGarre]

So beer colour EBC is linear then as Wheeler and Beer Engine say, not non-linear as Beersmith and most of the software say?

[Rick_UK]

I've always been confused about colour scales. In BYOBRA the guiness recipe comes in at 203 ebc with around 10% roasted barley. Others are around the 130 mark so on this scale your figure would seem fine.

Are there 2 different EBC scales?

[seymour]

I've always been confused about colour scales. In BYOBRA the guiness recipe comes in at 203 ebc with around 10% roasted barley. Others are around the 130 mark so on this scale your figure would seem fine.

Are there 2 different EBC scales?

There are (at least) two colour scales: SRM and EBC, so I always list both in my recipes. As I understand it, SRM x 1.97 = EBC. The 47 number quoted in the OP is surely SRM, which nearly matches my notes pegging Guinness at 49 SRM, so EBC would be around 96. Don't take this the wrong way, but SRM seems to be used more everywhere but England. But in the end, what does it matter, right? Once something is opaque black, it's as dark as night, you can't see through it, there's no other identifiable colour...so call it 40 or call it 200, it doesn't really matter how much higher the number goes.

Another shortcoming in all these scales, in my humble opinion, is the inability to account for redness. The numbers seem to do an okay job indicating how light or dark the beer is expected to be, but I'm always aiming for a pretty red colour, whether it be a red-tinted light amber colour, a reddish medium copper, or dark brown with red at the corners when held to the light. I've never seen a numeric system that can represent redness, nor a calculator which can predict how much redness you'll get from a designated grainbill. Just one more example of something that requires real-life brewing experience.

In case you're interested, here's the Beer Judge Certification Program Colour chart:

Color Descriptor: SRM Value
Straw: 2 - 3
Yellow: 3 - 4
Gold: 5 - 6
Amber: 6 - 9
Deep amber / light copper: 10 - 14
Copper: 14 - 17
Deep copper / light brown: 17 - 18
Brown: 19 - 22
Dark brown: 22 - 30
Very dark brown: 30 - 35
Black: 30 +
Black, opaque: 40 +

[orlando]

Don't take this the wrong way, but SRM seems to be used more everywhere but England.

EBC stands for European Brewing Convention would that not mean more than just England?

Whatever, your point about black is black and once you go beyond light penetrating it it hardly matters is the key for me. It wouldn't be colour that worries me, I've only ever cared about colour when trying to clone a beer, I would be more worried about the taste. That much roast malt could be quite astringent, acrid even, I would be steeping them in cold water for 24-48 hours to get the colour and some of the flavour but boiling them other than for the last 10 minutes to ensure its bug free would be my approach.

[DeGarre]

Explained better by IPA and Wheeler but using BE and trying to match London Pride's EBC value of ~23 ones gets a golden orange colour for which BeerSmith shows around 14 EBC. So ever EBC values can differ from other EBC values, hence the linearity issue.

This is what Wheeler says via IPA:

"The way Beer Engine calculates EBC is significantly different to Beer Smith and other programmes. This is Dave Wheelers answer when I posed the same question a while ago on this forum.


The reason that the colour calculation in BeerEngine does not match other software is mainly because most software, particularly American software, is reliant upon a thing called the Morey equation, which is flawed. I have no knowledge of Brewmate, but I suspect that it also uses Morey, even though it is written by an Aussie. The Morey equation perpetuates a misconception that beer colour is not linear; that is, that it assumes that if you double the ingredients you do not get twice the colour. In fact, for all practical purposes, you do get twice the colour.

This misconception goes back to 1991/2 when the late Dr George Fix performed an "experiment" whereby he took a dark American beer and measured its absorbance (colour) as-is and at several dilutions. Fix ended up with a strange-shaped "curve" and from this he concluded that the Beer-Lambert Law, commonly known as Beer's Law, did not apply to beer and that beer colour was non-linear. Beer's Law is a law pertaining to spectrophotometric measurement and, confusingly, Beer is a person in this context. The idea behind George Fix's "experiment" was that home brewers could measure the approximate colour of their beer by diluting a dark commercial beer of known colour until it matched the home brewed beer, and then calculate its colour from the dilution required.

Other people tried to make colour prediction formulae using Fix's data, or at least incorporating Fix's non-linearity assumption, but these were somewhat unsatisfactory. They had obvious limitations and different formula covered different colour ranges. Then another worker, Dan Morey, came along and combined the various formulae into one universal formula. This became known as the Morey equation.

Unfortunately, George Fix did not know how to use a spectrophotometer properly; he was trying to use it outside of its reliable range. His laboratory technique was somewhat school-boyish and his interpretation was flawed. The flaws were noticed at the time and highlighted, but it became quite controversial because George Fix, and some of his followers, doggedly defended his results and methodology to the hilt; despite the fact that people far better qualified pointed out where he went wrong, and despite the fact that several people performed similar experiments using the same reference beer and found no deviation from Beer's Law.

So the Morey equation is wildly wrong because it is based on bad data that has had its errors compounded by other workers who tried to make the data fit the real world. It is unfortunate that these formulae still persist some twenty years later, but I think it persists because has been incorporated into so much software. If it was not for software perpetuating these ideas, they would have been dead, buried and forgotten years ago"

[seymour]

Don't take this the wrong way, but SRM seems to be used more everywhere but England.

EBC stands for European Brewing Convention would that not mean more than just England?

That's true, it just seems to me SRM is used more, even by German and Belgian breweries, authors, reviewers, etc. But you guys are over there and I'm not, so I could definitely be wrong.

[MikeG]

Another shortcoming in all these scales, in my humble opinion, is the inability to account for redness.

Well said seymore ...and how do they make beers red? I'm thinking of the Shepherd Neame "Autumn Late Red" lovely beer and lovely colour.

... and thanks DeGarre for the excellent post. I was thinking I'd try BeerSmith but not now. ...and BeerEngine is free!!

[hophit]

Another shortcoming in all these scales, in my humble opinion, is the inability to account for redness. The numbers seem to do an okay job indicating how light or dark the beer is expected to be, but I'm always aiming for a pretty red colour, whether it be a red-tinted light amber colour, a reddish medium copper, or dark brown with red at the corners when held to the light. I've never seen a numeric system that can represent redness, nor a calculator which can predict how much redness you'll get from a designated grainbill. Just one more example of something that requires real-life brewing experience.

So what is your secret for redness? Carared seems to work well for me, but no cheap, any other ways? Crystal just doesn't seem to do it the same for me.

[orlando]

Another shortcoming in all these scales, in my humble opinion, is the inability to account for redness. The numbers seem to do an okay job indicating how light or dark the beer is expected to be, but I'm always aiming for a pretty red colour, whether it be a red-tinted light amber colour, a reddish medium copper, or dark brown with red at the corners when held to the light. I've never seen a numeric system that can represent redness, nor a calculator which can predict how much redness you'll get from a designated grainbill. Just one more example of something that requires real-life brewing experience.

So what is your secret for redness? Carared seems to work well for me, but no cheap, any other ways? Crystal just doesn't seem to do it the same for me.

Carared is deceptive with its name, roast barley is the key to getting the red colour but it takes some experimentation to get it right. I haven't manged it to the degree I was looking for but as colour is not important to me I've so far not risen to the challenge.

[PhilB]

Hi Seymour

There are (at least) two colour scales:

... true, but as De Garre's post points out there are also (at least) two methods of calculating colour, and so, in recipes at least, we really ought to quote the method by which we calculated the colour of the finished beer, as well as the number that it represents (e.g. 98 EBC (by MCU) (that's the Malt Colour Units method of predicting colour, as recommended by Graham Wheeler and used in Beer Engine) equates to around 43 EBC (by Morey) ... the difference is most sharply experienced in this dark brown colour range (the 98 vs 43 EBC differences being experienced using different tools for Wheeler's recipe for Theakston's Old Peculiar ) )

Hi hophit

So what is your secret for redness?

... I don't have any experience at this, but when I attempt to make a red ale I will be basing the recipe on the advice from zgoda, from over over there on the forum (link) ... bear in mind that when he suggests colouring with roasted barley to 35 EBC, I believe he means to 35 EBC (by MCU)

Cheers, PhilB

[zgoda]

35 EBC as measured by spectrowhatever they have in most large brewery labs (mine was tested in Heineken lab).

Being mislead by some US made software I now base my colour targeting on my own experience only.

[PhilB]

Hi zgoda

35 EBC as measured by spectrowhatever they have in most large brewery labs (mine was tested in Heineken lab).

... thanks for the clarification ... but I still believe (assuming that the Heineken lab's know how to calibrate their spectrowhatevers correctly, as Wheeler explains is important in De Garre's post above) that that would equate to 35 EBC (by MCU) ... that's what you get following your "250 gms crystal and 30-40 gms roasted barley" advice using that method ... that'd equate to around 25 EBC (by Morey) or 13 SRM (by Morey) in that US made software

Cheers, PhilB