I’ve recently been dry hopping in the secondary with pellets and am wondering if that is contributing to my beers coming out darker than expected? The reason I think this might be the case is that I made a ‘white IPA’ with pilsner, malted wheat, and a touch of c20. Dry hopped with 1 oz of Cascades (3 gallon batch). The beer was a sort of cloudy greyish/brown color out of the bottle, and should have been pretty much pale yellow. I did get one bottle that looked right, but most had the same off-coloring. Anyone experience this? For my last IPA with Galaxy hops, same thing appears to be happening. Not 100% sure though since it did have c20 and c40 as part of the grain bill. Still looks darker than it should though, and I even tried using a hop bag on the end of my racking hose for this one.
Highly hopped beers can get a hop haze where they just stay cloudy a little longer than average. Yeast has a lot to do with clarity of beer. What yeast did you use? Conditioning time, especially cold conditioning will help clear up your beer. Of course there are also many other factors that lead to cloudy beer.
WLP300 for the White IPA, WLP001 for the IPA. It’s not the cloudy part that bothers me, it’s the color. I wonder if there is something else in my process causing it? Just made a double IPA and have leaf hops for dry hopping. I’ll see how that comes out. Of course, this will be my first kegged beer, so there’s another factor to consider…
No, dry hopping (with pellets, vs leaf) isn’t going to affect the color of your beer.
If I had to guess–given your described recipe–I’d guess that your mash pH was too high. A high mash pH can result in a considerably darker wort. Take a look at the “Malliard Reactions” secton on Kai’s site:
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... ts_brewingYes, that could be it. Looks like I need to start playing with my water profile… Thanks.
I don’t know, haze can make a beer look a little darker.
That greyish color reminds me of my witbier. Its wheat and pils and comes out kind of greay and slightly murky. I thiink the commercial examples are that color too.
Thinking about it a little more, I remember when I transferred both to secondary for dry hopping, I drew a sample for gravitiy reading and poured into a glass after measurng. Color was MUCH lighter than the final product. I’ll probably try the same recipes next time and use leaf hops to see if that makes a difference. Thanks for all the help.
Dry hopping will not affect the color of your beer. it just wont.
