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Beer Color Corrector

Find your beer's color by holding a clear cuvette to the screen and matching the swatch ladder, or just key in SRM/EBC. Then get the exact dose of Sinamar, brewers caramel, or another colorant to reach a target color or a beer style. Color additions only go up; to lighten, dilute.

Your beer's color now

Viewing vessel (sets the light path)

Turn screen brightness to full. Fill the cuvette, wipe it, and hold its two clear faces flat against the white panel below. That's your backlight. Slide it over the swatches until the transmitted color matches, then tap that swatch.

No swatch selected yet.

Target color

Style (aims at the style's typical color)

Batch & colorant

Batch volume (what the colorant goes into)

Featured colorant (all options are compared below)

Add: Sinamar

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This target is lighter than your beer. Colorants only add color. They can't remove it. To lighten, dilute with paler beer or water (see the Dilution & Blending calculator), or rebuild the grist.

Reading past ~25 SRM by eye is approximate. In a thin cuvette dark beers stay translucent, but the hue steps crowd together and screen variation starts to dominate. Trust a meter here if you have one.

That's a big color jump. Color is taken as additive, which holds well for small corrections; large additions stack less linearly and may carry flavor. Consider splitting it, or dose a measured sample and scale up.

Dose by colorant (pick by what you can get)

How the swatches are made. Each swatch is computed, not eyeballed: the beer's transmission spectrum is reconstructed from its SRM at your chosen path length and integrated against the CIE 1931 observer under D65, then converted to sRGB. This is A. J. deLange's model (the basis of the BJCP color guide), via the MIT-licensed olfarve implementation by Thomas Ascher. Screens vary, so treat a match as a good estimate, not a lab reading. Comparing against the swatch right next to the beer cancels much of that drift.

Choosing a cuvette. A 10 mm path-length cuvette with two clear (polished) faces is ideal: view through those, against white. Plain disposable PMMA/acrylic cuvettes in the visible range cost pennies in 100-packs (~3.5 mL standard, or 1.5 mL semi-micro); there's no need for UV-grade quartz at 430 nm. A single glass cuvette is the durable reusable option. Avoid all-frosted cuvettes and anything not labeled 10 mm.

The fine print. Color isn't the whole style. This matches hue, not the malt bill or flavor. Read clear, degassed beer (haze and bubbles lighten the result). Sinamar is debittered malt and stays clean; sugar caramels add a little flavor as the dose climbs. Dose figures: Sinamar and Caramel TMF are from maker dose sheets (Weyermann; Murphy & Son); the generic caramel and roast-malt-extract entries are typical values. Confirm your bottle's rating.