Making Lighter (colour!) Beers

[poggor]

i only do partial mashes- i usually make a mini mash of 2-4 kg of grain and use LDME to get my gravity up to desired level. Most of my beers are a similar colour- a dark orange, not yellow at all. if you know what i mean.

anyone got any suggestions to try and make a lighter/paler beer without going to AG?


cheers


g

 

[peaky]

What grains are you normally mashing?

 

[poggor]

What grains are you normally mashing?

The last one i did i used german pilsner malt and a little caramel pils. came out very amber. nice taste etc..

 

[QldKev]

ummmm, did you follow a recipe, then post it and we can help

 

[poggor]

recipe:

0.7kg german pilsner
0.3kg caramel pils
2.5kg LDME
hops, yeast

 

[argon]

What's the reason you don't want to go ag? If your mashing already between 2 and 4kg there is no reason why you couldn't.

Other than that, you can get extra light ldme from the sponsors that would help achieve lighter colour beers.

 

[hoppinmad]

I've used light spray malt before which has a very low ebc. Also you could try using a small portion of flaked rice with your pilsner malt to add fermentables without colour

 

[dougsbrew]

recipe:

0.7kg german pilsner
0.3kg caramel pils
2.5kg LDME
hops, yeast

seeing your ldme is the major componet id say that where your color is coming from.
what temp you mashing/sparging at? how long are you boiling for?, an addition of dextrose and more water will drop your colour.

 

[kelbygreen]

also when you boil LDME it gets darker I found but its best to boil it. maybe use Briess pilsen extract or as say try a AG batch with just pilsen malt or a pale ale malt

 

[Florian]

I have only done 2 beers with extract, so this might not be the norm, but both came out very amber in colour, even with short 15 minute boils of only 1/6 of the total extract volume (boiled 1/3 of a can in a recipe calling for 2 cans, and added the rest straight to the fermenter). The extract I used was called "extra pale". I switched to all grain after that.

 

[QldKev]

recipe:

0.7kg german pilsner
0.3kg caramel pils
2.5kg LDME
hops, yeast

There's several color calculators out there, this is just a random one from a google. I use the one built into BeerSmith
http://beercalculus.hopville.com/recipe

The recipe gives 16 EBC / 8 SRM (Gold to Copper)

Then if you break it down 13 EBC is coming from just the 2.5kg LDME
If you used say 3kg BB Pale you would only end up with 4 EBC

QldKev

 

[Lord Raja Goomba I]

I'm with argon. Not trying to throw your topic or anything, but if you are partial mashing, you may as well whole mash. The convenience of extract is lost when you partial, and you don't get the better flavour of AG. It's like the worst of both worlds.

Unless it is an equipment thing, in which case BIAB and the stovetop method (my method of choice, albeit I've changed it to suit me) would be better.

Boiling down extract does tend to make it darker, as will caramel malt, which adds, without effort 10-15 EBC by itself at the quantity you're using.

Goomba