Getting Lighter Colour With Extract

[waggastew]

Just tried out my newest brew, a wheat/wiess/wit/weizen cross-euro thingy. The recipe was based on a tin of Thomas Coopers Wheat Beer and a tin of Cooper Wheat Malt. Beer is great (will post a full review later) but the colour is a little too golden. Not a problem per se but takes away from the presentation a bit.

Anybody got any ideas on keeping beers light in colour? Apparently Morgan's had an extra light malt that is no longer available? There are some light kits available (Coopers Canadian or Cerveza) but obviously they are not gonna make a good wheat.

Ideas appreciated.

 

[RobH]

Using Ianh's spreadsheet (search for it on this forum) as a guide with your ingredients I can see a difference of 6.3 to 5.6 EBC just by upping the water from 20 litres to 23. I am no guru on beer color, but I thought 6.3 was already quite pale.

Anyway. it sounds too simple, but maybe just add a couple of litres extra of water inyour fermenter.

 

[bconnery]

Just tried out my newest brew, a wheat/wiess/wit/weizen cross-euro thingy. The recipe was based on a tin of Thomas Coopers Wheat Beer and a tin of Cooper Wheat Malt. Beer is great (will post a full review later) but the colour is a little too golden. Not a problem per se but takes away from the presentation a bit.

Anybody got any ideas on keeping beers light in colour? Apparently Morgan's had an extra light malt that is no longer available? There are some light kits available (Coopers Canadian or Cerveza) but obviously they are not gonna make a good wheat.

Ideas appreciated.

How long a boil do you do, and do you use all the extract for a long portion?

A wit is almost impossible to achieve a really light colour with the extracts we generally have available here.

The best I could get was to only boil a small portion of the extract for the whole boil and put the rest in only in the last 5/10 minutes.

The other main way is to add grain, and increase the amount of that you use. I had good results using 1kg of base malt in a mini-mash, specialty grains as required, and extract for the rest.
This is easy to do with basic equipment and also means you can keep the extract for adding late and only boil the liquid from the mini-mash for the whole period...

 

[Dazza_devil]

What's in the glass and what's on the spreadsheet may be 2 different things depending on your method and particular ingredients.
If you boil your extract it will darken. I've noticed a considerable difference in adding liquid or dried extract at flameout as opposed to boiling it seperately for sanitation purposes.
Also LME will darken with age, an old tin will give you more EBC's. I would imagine that the stated colour would be that of a fresh tin.
The lightest beer in colour that I have made was using Munton's Dried Wheat Extract(expensive but worth it) in a Hefe Weissbeir, adding the malt at flameout. It was expected to be around 6-7 EBC's and looks it. I did put a little malt in the boil to adjust the boil gravity to around 1.040 so that would of darkened the beer slightly.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the Cooper's LDME is lighter in colour than the Bintani stuff that get's around the place.