Beer colour. (Rant!).

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PeeBee
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Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Sat May 14, 2022 2:08 pm

While trying to get to grips with "invert sugar" (Beers (late 19th Century and 20th Century) I inevitably fell into the topic of "beer colour" and the predicting of it. Colour isn't something that normally bothers me; it's pretty easy to make "bitters" that are not the colour of "stout", but this sugar game has made some upfront idea of colour useful.

Highly controversial subject it seems, and the controversy has been going on for decades. Initially it all seemed to centre around the centuries old "Beer-Lambert Law" (Beer a person, not the excellent beverage!) and some (dodgy?) work by the late Dr George Fix three decades ago. But it coalesced into bun fight between supporters of "linear" (straight-line graph) relationship between ingredients and resulting beer colour, championed by the late Graham Wheeler, and supporters or a non-linear curved-line relationship such as "Morey's Formula" (inspired by Dr Fix's work) and championed by many "homebrewing heroes" who've also added their own adaptions of the formula.

There's a good example of the controversy on this forum: Calculating colour units (over 14 years old - Graham wades in a few posts down the thread).


My view of this is that the line (graph) must be curved because of all the processes involved in creating the beer wort (mashing, boiling, etc). Beer isn't the exception to Beer-Lamberts Law, it's an exception to the Law (i.e. one of many). So, I'm a "curved-line" supporter? Not at all! The guys who created these curved-line formulas are so cock-sure of themselves they create just the one inflexible formula that handles all situations (unless there are adaptable formulas I don't know about?). When it doesn't work it's not the formula's fault, it's the users who can't use it properly. Worse still, the curved line might fit for mashes, but surely colour from boil ingredients (sugars, malt extract, etc.) must still follow a straight-line?

Unfortunately, those curved-line formulas are used extensively by homebrewing recipe builders so they can't be corrected anytime soon. They also don't seem to switch to straight-line predictions for boiled ingredients.

So, straight-line? Read that linked thread (above) and you may notice Graham mentions something a bit "odd" about his colour prediction formula. It includes the mash efficiency value. What's that got to do with colour? Rather than create a "new" variable for users to tune (aarg, another!), Graham is assuming the same things that dictate a brewers' "efficiency" affects their ability to get colour out of ingredients. It's a "constant" (an adjustable "constant"!), or a "kludge" or, if you want to be rude, a "bodge". But it does mean that colour is "adaptable", roughly tuned to the brewers' own setup. Something the other formulas don't seem to be able to do.

Convinces me! I've installed "Beer Engine" (Graham Wheeler's software, available for free on this forum's Web site and given an update by a supporter). I keep "Beersmith" running alongside for a while yet though.

Has anyone got anything to add?
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by Eric » Sun May 15, 2022 4:29 pm

PeeBee wrote...
Has anyone got anything to add?
On April 13 last R.P. in his blog wrote...
As well as brewing a shit-load of Mild, Hancock also dabbled a little with Pale Ales. Though this is a pretty odd example.

Why? Because, just like XX, it contains a very large amount of No. 3 invert sugar. Which leaves it extremely dark for a Pale Ale: about the colour of modern Dark Mild. It’s all a bit weird.
But 2 weeks since, I brewed a beer that included 6.5% Ragus No 3 Invert Sugar. OK, not 37.84%, but you might care to extrapolate its effect from a photograph. Imagine what the colour might be without 6.5% invert, then add 5 times as much colour you assume the invert provided in my brew. Somehow I don't get the impression that 37.84% Ragus #3 invert can make a beer extremely dark. So is today's invert lighter in colour than it was over a century ago? My belief, no.
6%Ragus#3.jpeg
6%Ragus#3.jpeg (467.63 KiB) Viewed 1934 times

It's more than half a century since I first used sugar in brewing, and can't remember a lot of about those, but always recall my first Black Treacle addition. It dominated and permanently spoiled the beer, but later found a much lesser proportion can be lovely, and at those levels it didn't vastly colour the beer. Similar was found with molasses and blackstrap to conclude that an upper limit for taste is reached before significantly influencing colour, and this would have always been the case using cane sugar.

I suspect #4 (of which I have no experience) might be different, coloured by something that adds less flavour, but more colour.

So I repeat that in the realms of invert sugar, plan for taste, not colour.

In broader terms, when making beer, think taste, not colour.
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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by IPA » Wed May 18, 2022 1:19 pm

This is Graham's reply to my question about beer colour on his own forum a few years ago.

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.
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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Fri May 20, 2022 1:17 pm

IPA wrote:
Wed May 18, 2022 1:19 pm
This is Graham's reply to my question about beer colour on his own forum a few years ago. ...
Thanks for that. I have read it, but reading it again made me rip up my next rant on the subject and start drafting a second rant. Now I've read again I've binned the second rant too.

There seemed to be two issues at work: That of Dr Fix's discredited work judging the colour of beer (I don't think many homebrewers' have access to a spectrophotometer so could have been useful if his work weren't "flawed") and the clowns that followed him who thought they could use the work to predict the colour of beer. And Graham recognises this "split" in the text of that reply.

So, I was being naïve thinking the calculators should only be following the disputed "non-linear" relationship between ingredients and final colour should be restricted to the mashtun; nooo ... the calculator creators do believe the colour calculations apply to the entire brewing process, and one inflexible formula fits all! The muppets! And it seems, they believe that beer is the exception to Beer-Lambert's Law, not "an exception".

Meanwhile, the homebrewers using these calculators must carry on using them and ignore the wildly inaccurate colour predictions they calculate: Or switch to GW's "Beer Engine" software that at least attempts to make an intelligent and flexible judgment of colour. (Or actually believe the brain-dead colour predictions the calculators present).

I never used to take any notice of the colour predictions the calculators (in my case - Beersmith) presented because I knew how bad they were. I'm only doing it now as I continue working with my "invert sugar" emulations. I've already switched to GW's software! It wouldn't surprise me to learn those folk who support the colour predictions many calculators present are the same guys responsible for perpetuating the insanity of colouring "invert sugar" by caramelising it! Which gives me an idea for my next post on the subject ... I can present a direct comparison of beer colour in picture form (computer screens are notoriously bad at rendering "true" colours, but in this case, they should present a reasonable comparison because the calculators are so wildly out).

So, "to be continued" (in a couple of weeks or so).
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by guypettigrew » Fri May 20, 2022 3:45 pm

Loving these esoteric posts, PeeBee. And good to see the nuts appearing in the photos!

Do you know which sugar brewers primed the beers with when they were casked? Was it invert sugar, ordinary sugar, or didn't they bother priming?

Guy

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Fri May 20, 2022 5:08 pm

Esoteric? One of those words that has flittered around me, but when replying to that post made me realise, I never really knew what it meant! So, ... tap, tap, tap ... "likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge". Okay, a month ago I didn't understand what the fuss was about regarding "beer colour". But I do now! And it's really annoying to find information I've put my faith in is sourced from under the sewerage storm overflows of the truth treatment works. It should be more widely understood that these "homebrew heroes" are hawking about complete garbage.

You've posted in my openly declared "Rant!" post so I reckon you should be expecting a reply in "rant mode"?

Anyway, it was my mucking about with "invert sugar" that sparked off this thread, so: I've not much specific knowledge about "priming sugars" only that I have seen quotes that some beers were primed with invert sugars. Many brewers wouldn't bother priming casks, relying on their skill and experience to cask the beer at just the right moment. "Ordinary" sugar wouldn't have been used because the taxman was so sharp about what sugar is allowed or not.

One possibility I did dream up recently is: Theakston's OP was reckoned (by some) to be primed with "treacle". Perhaps they were priming their casks? But not using "treacle" but No.4 Invert Syrup? Likely that would be utter nonsense, but I wouldn't be the first to dress up complete nonsense as "fact". (That was a passing shot at the A-Oles I've got my sights on in this thread).

They haven't got a squirrel smiley with its nuts, so have a dancing pink elephant instead :pink:
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Tue May 24, 2022 1:33 pm

Can't wait for the beer to be ready, the colour predictions out of Beersmith (the brew planning software I use) and my post-boil SG sample (puknometer contents) should be enough to get the idea.

Proper colour assessments will require samples of a particular size and depth and lighting of a specified type, etc. But we're only interested in a rough idea of what it's going to look like drinking it from a glass. Beer-Lambeth's Law isn't really concerned with colour, it's to do with spectroscopy, and covers a much wider range of topics, like one I saw was "attenuation of radiation through the Earth’s atmosphere". There's a number of reasons why it is knocked off its "linear" results. Applied roughly to estimating colour, "linear" has the advantage of being easy to understand, judge, and calculate.

This Hancock XX recipe is quite handy as Beersmith estimates near enough 20EBC and Beer Engine has it twice that as 40EBC. I can nick the Beersmith icons of that to show how easy it is to judge this or that:
20EBC.JPG
20EBC.JPG (10.85 KiB) Viewed 1761 times
40EBC.JPG
40EBC.JPG (10.92 KiB) Viewed 1761 times
Now to compare my sample. Beersmith often lets me down with wildly inaccurate colour predictions (uses a non-linear "Morey's formula", or a variation of it). I've been a little disappointed with Beer Engine because I've trumpeted its ability to be "adaptable" but find this feature will only allow for small tweaks (1-2EBC). But this exercise shouldn't cause it any trouble; it should be easy to pick out if it's closer to 20EBC or the darker 40EBC:
20220524_131442_WEB.jpg
20220524_131442_WEB.jpg (32.56 KiB) Viewed 1761 times
... Oh ... bug***
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by f00b4r » Tue May 24, 2022 2:44 pm

The colour will look a lot darker as a full pint.
I have to admit to never really being bothered about the colour of my homebrew but I don’t brew historical/clone recipes much, where caramel may be often be used to alter it.

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by WalesAles » Wed May 25, 2022 10:06 am

f00b4r wrote:
Tue May 24, 2022 2:44 pm
where caramel may be often be used to alter it.
And Gravy Browning! :D

WA

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Wed May 25, 2022 11:10 am

f00b4r wrote:
Tue May 24, 2022 2:44 pm
The colour will look a lot darker as a full pint. ...
It will! But that was my SG sample, and I wasn't digging any more out (which is all cloudy with yeast at this time).

But my "sample glass" (okay, one of me Mum's liquor glasses) ain't far from the EBC requirement (25mm path length, below 27 colour units that is) whereas a pint glass would be well over.

Graham Wheeler was right. All this mucking about and wasting time with spectroscopy is a result of the late Dr Fix getting it all wrong. I had hoped my "kitchen laboratory" would have swayed some ideas of beer colour more Graham's way, but it didn't, and I'm rather disillusioned when it came to applying his "fudge factor" - it doesn't do much "fudging"! Not that the "Morey Minions" should be too pleased I could back up their approach as I did say their predictions were wildly out, but that also means it goes their way now and again (like above).

Beer colour is easy, it is yellow, amber, brown or black.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by WalesAles » Wed May 25, 2022 4:19 pm


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Re: Beer colour. (Rant!).

Post by PeeBee » Wed May 25, 2022 4:36 pm

WalesAles wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 4:19 pm
And Green! #-o
You are talking rubbish ... this label clearly says, "Gravy Browning"; definitely does not say "Greening".
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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