How Does Beer get its Color?
by John R. Calen, BJCP National Judge

Many people who are just learning about beer want to know about its color. After a lifetime's experience with pale straw-colored beers, they can be put off by the amber, red, brown and black beers. Is the beer old? Is it strong? Is it syrupy?

Well, relax. The color of a beer has no bearing on its strength, age, or viscosity. It merely has to do with the ingredients and the length of the boil.

The major American brewers make their beers with the palest malt they can find and further lighten their beer's color with pale adjuncts such as rice and corn. You can lighten the color even more by making a weaker beer, such as the low calorie, low carbohydrate beers that are currently popular.

Just because a beer is dark, doesn’t mean it's strong in alcohol or flavor. The most popular dry stouts which are nearly black, have a strength equal to a light beer at around 4% ABV (Alcohol by volume). If you've ever been served a black and tan, notice that it's the stout that floats atop the lighter colored beer. If the stout were heavier, that would not be possible.

Where does a stout get its color? From roasted barley. The barley seed is roasted in a kiln to give it a black color. Roasting also gives the malt a coffee-like flavor.

Amber beers such as pale ale and Munich lagers get their color from grains that have been processed to bring more color and flavor to the beer. Crystal, or caramel malt, gives color and a residual sweetness as well as a caramel malty flavor to beers. Munich and Vienna malts don’t give the same sort of sweetness, but they add color, grainy and malty flavors and aromas to their brews.

Long boiling times contribute to color deepening through a process that creates melanoidins, a flavor compound found in bock beers, for example.

Finally, hops can also add their own color to beers. They are green and bright. they can also be somewhat dichroic, that is the color can be different when viewed from a different angle. Highly hopped beers such as pilsners and IPAs are where you can best see the colors that hops can add.

Just as a red wine is the same strength as a white, a dark beer is not necessarily stronger than a light beer.

A Quick Primer on Beer Styles
by John R. Calen, BJCP National Judge

Loosely put, a beer style is a set of flavors and aromas that define kinds of beers. They are used to tell beers apart from one another. The phrase is often credited to English beer writer, Michael Jackson (especially by Jackson, himself!)

Beer styles are useful to prepare a drinker for what to expect from a brew. Often, just looking at a bottle or decanted beer is not adequate because beers that look similar to each other can be radically different in flavor, aroma and alcoholic content.

Parameters such as color, maltiness, hoppiness, fruitiness, alcohol level and others are what define beer styles. When you know what to expect, this becomes a powerful tool to aid in shopping for beers and matching them with food.

Some style names indicate a place of origin, such as a Munich lager and Pilsener, others can reveal the class of people it was popular with, such as porter. Sometimes it simply tells what it is as in pale ale and brown ale.

Here are a few examples: