I recently brewed two beers, an amber ale and a ginger pale ale. In beer smith the amber was 11.6 and the pale ale was 11.5 srm. They both look great for the style they are but they are very different colors. The pale ale is golden and the amber is well amber.
Do you find software to be accurate with srm prediction and it is likely that some other variable is responsible? Im very happy with how the came out but i cant help but want to figure out why they are different.
I’ve found beersmith to be at least reasonably accurate. Like any other software though, the output is only as good as its inputs. If you don’t know the SRM of your ingrediants, than it can’t predict the resulting final color. Is this an extract brew? Did the two beers use different types of extract? If so, their color values in beersmith may not be accurate.
Another thing where you can run into issues is good old human error in measurement. I don’t think this is the problem in your case, since the beers turned out appropriate for style. But if you are adding a very dark malt (like black patent say) to adjust color, a little bit makes a big difference, so a small measurement error can have a big impact.
I’m a pretty loyal Beersmith user. I don’t think you can depend on such software to predict color very reliably, but I think it does a reasonably good job predicting how dark a beer will be.
Note that other factors beyond estimated grain SRM can affect color. For example, length of boil or actual boil off rate can affect color/darkness. I also saw an interesting Basic Brewing video some time ago, which suggested that hops also affect the color of beer–not sure why that would be though.
