Color is an integral and important part of our experience of food and drink, and beer is no exception. When beer is poured into a clear glass, the color is the first thing the prospective beer drinker will notice. Color invariably conjures up expectations, usually subliminal, of the flavor experience ahead. A bright golden beer may lead one to expect refreshment and to recall sunny days spent in beer gardens, whereas a reddish–black beer with a thick brown head may evoke expectations of malty roasted flavors and thoughts of sitting in front of a roaring fireplace. Because color works so powerfully upon the mind, chefs, winemakers, and brewers alike will pay very close attention to achieving the right hues for their creations.

It is ironic, therefore, that color can be an unreliable indicator of flavor. This is because color exists more in the mind than in reality; technically, color is the mere reflection or refraction of light as it strikes an object, solid, liquid, or gaseous. Our eyes register the wavelengths of light they receive, and the brain translates these into the colors we see. In beer, color is determined in various ways. The most significant source of beer color is pigments in the grain. Both the malted and the unmalted grains used in the brewhouse are kilned dried; the longer the drying process and the higher the drying temperature, the darker will be the grist for the mash and the more opaque will be the beer made from it. See black malt, caramel malts, crystal malt, malt, and roasted malts. Gently kilned malt may make a beer that is brilliantly blonde, transparent, and sparkling, whereas roasted malts can be used to make beer that is virtually impenetrable by light. Through the judicious composition of the grain bill, therefore, a brewer can make beers of any shade and hue from light straw to amber, copper, red, mahogany, dark brown, and finally black. In addition, adjuncts such as rice, corn, or white sugar can be added during the brewing process to replace malt, resulting in a lighter color.

Similar colors in different beers may be derived from different sources. For example, dark Belgian beer styles such as dubbel often derive their brown color not from roasted malts, but from a highly caramelized invert sugar syrup called candi sugar. See candi sugar. Candi sugar is highly fermentable and rarely leaves much residual sweetness in beer. The flavors given by dark candi sugar syrup (caramel, raisins, burnt sugar) are quite different than those given by roasted malts (coffee, chocolate), even when the color of the beer is similar. This is one reason why a Belgian dubbel does not taste like an English brown ale. See brown ale and dubbel.

Dark candi sugar, which is specifically meant to give both color and flavor to beer, is different from products designed to be pure colorants. Various caramel colors, from malt-derived German “farbebier” to the old American “Porterine,” have been widely available to brewers for more than 100 years. See colorants. These can be used to overcome natural variations and adjust the color of a beer to meet a particular specification, or they can be used, like a form of makeup, to completely change the viewer’s perception of a beer. A golden beer, when rendered russet–brown by caramel coloring, may be perceived by the consumer as having a far richer flavor than it actually does. It is interesting to note that advertising photos that depict the color of mass-market lagers will often show a color notably darker than the beer is in real life.

Chemical reactions that take place during malting, mashing, and wort boiling can also contribute to beer color. These include the so-called Maillard reaction, often referred to as non-enzymatic browning, during which melanoidins are created. These are responsible for the amber hue in many beers. See maillard reaction and melanoidins. Traditional lager malts, which are not usually as highly modified as ale malts, tend to have lighter color. Higher modification leads to a higher sugar and amino acid content in the malt, and this produces deeper colors in the kiln or roasting drum. Oxidation during the brewing process or later during a beer’s natural aging process can affect beer color as well, typically bringing on a yellow–brown tinge.

Brewers use several more technical methods for distinguishing between different colors and their intensities. One of the earliest methods was a color scale developed by Joseph Lovibond, which is divided into “degrees Lovibond,” usually abbreviated as L. See lovibond. This scale is still in use today, particularly in the United States. It is based on a standardized set of color samples that are used for a visual comparison with a beer or wort sample. A very pale beer usually has a Lovibond value of about 2°L, whereas a very dark beer may have values about 30°L. In 1958, the American Society of Brewing Chemists adopted a scale based on the absorbance of a single-wavelength light with a wavelength of 430 nm in beer in a half-inch-diameter jar. It was called the Standard Reference Method (SRM). Conveniently, when SRM values were adjusted by a correction factor of 10, the numbers virtually matched those of the Lovibond scale for identical beers. Maltsters now rate their malts in terms of the Lovibond values for a wort derived from that malt in a standard mash. Beer colors, on the other hand, are now more likely to be given as SRM values. The European Brewery Convention (EBC), being rooted in the metric system, has its own EBC color scale, whereby the conversion between SRM and EBC and vice versa is “loosely” as follows:

xEBC = [(x × 0.375) + 0.46] SRM

ySRM = [(y × 2.65) – 1.2] EBC.

For instance, a golden blonde Pilsner with a color value of 4.5 SRM would be have an EBC color value of 4.5 multiplied by 2.65 minus 1.2 = 10.725 EBC.

As a general rule, yellow to straw blonde beers have color values of 4 to 8 EBC (2 to 4 SRM), pale ales of perhaps 20 to 30 EBC (10 to 15 SRM), and stouts of 70 to 140 EBC (35 to 70 SRM). Colorant additives may have color values as high as 9,000 EBC (3,375 SRM). A pale malt may have a color value of 1.5°L to 2.5°L (roughly 2.8 to 5.4 EBC), a caramel malt 60°L (roughly 160 EBC), and a chocolate malt 350°L (roughly 925 SRM). Various blends of differently colored malts allow the brewer to achieve a wide range of color.

Just as many wine drinkers erroneously equate dark colors with both concentration and high quality, so beer drinkers often conflate darker color with alcoholic strength. In fact, beer color is entirely unrelated to beer strength, and most people are surprised to hear that nearly black draught Guinness has only about 4.2% alcohol by volume (ABV), making it notably lighter in alcohol than American Budweiser, which has about 5%. Conversely a golden-hued Belgian tripel will have about 9% ABV, and a German maibock of similar color can have a great depth of malt flavor and 8% ABV or above.

Another range of colors in beer may be derived from fruit, as is the case in Belgian kriek (cherries) and framboise (raspberries). Colors from fruit may be bright, especially if the fruit was added in the form of juice, or dulled, especially if the beer is barrel aged, where slow oxidation will eventually bring on brownish hues.