Brew query

[Big Al]

I recently made a batch of Coopers lager.
Started on the 07/06/09
Made it with 500g of brewing sugar
500g of Spray Malt
and for a bit extra added 4 ounces of granulated sugar.

Bottled my brew into 2 litre pop bottles on the 21/06/09.
Now i didn't take an final reading over 3 days but just decided that fermentation must have finished especially with how warm it had been.

OG was 1038
and FG was 1006.

I primed each bottle with 1 1/2 tablespoons of brewing sugar.

Now I have today looked at my bottles and noticed they were a lot darker in colour than previous batches and noticed two smaller bottles had distored quite a
bit so had to release some of the pressure which resulted in a lot of fizz coming up.

Now my questions are why might it be darker in colour
and could the beer really not have finished fermenting for the bottles to distort so much

[Big Al]

It could be a possibility that I might have over primed 2 of the bottles, but am still not sure as to how come it is darker in colour,
any suggestions?

[OldSpeckledBadger]

The darker colour suggests to me that the kit was old stock. Liquid malt extract tends to go darker with age. You might also find it has an odd twang when you taste it.

[Big Al]

Oh dear, I hope not. I brewed this batch up especially for a BBQ to try and show off to my friends.
Hopefully they will not know any better and hopefully it will still taste ok.

[Normski]

Hey Al what spraymalt did you use. If it was medium or dark. it'll darken it.

[Big Al]

It should have been light but thinking about it, I might not have checked it propperly :-/

Mental note dont try to rush beer making when your tired and the kids r playing up

[Big Al]

Tried my first bottle of this on monday, admittedly it was a 1 litre bottle and I was not impressed. Hopefully it was a dodgy bottle and not the fact that I might have used the wrong malt when making. I did have to open the bottle quite a few times to release the pressure, so hopefully that will have cuased the not entirely unpleasant tast....

Else I have another 22 litres of the stuff to get through and if it all tastes the same it is going to be a long slow process.

[pauljmuk]

if it was a darker spray malt that did it, dont worry - wont affect the taste much at all. It's rather like using black malt in the extract process - really just for colour.