Questions about my Porter, any help very much appreciated

[Graeme]

Hey guys,

New here, from Ireland. Ive been doing Extract brewing for the last four to five months with my uncle. We did a few Pale Ales, but coming up to Xmas I wanted to do a Porter, which i did on Saturday last. It's fermenting alright, but fermentation started off a little bit slow, but seems to be coming along fine. Now i took a test sample, and the colour to me appears to be alot different that i had planned. It's more of a dark red to black, rather than your typical very black porter. Will this get darker as fermentation progresses? I used the following recipe. One concern I have is that I should have used Dark LME rather than Light...the recipe did specify Light, and I figured the grains would take care of the colour. New to the world of brewing as you can see but absolutely loving and have a great passion for it, and have had of good beer for a long time. Any help or tips would be great regarding colour. Recipe is Metric.

2400.0 g Dry Light
330.0 g Munich Malt
250.0 g Crystal Malt 60

[manplant]

Your color will be dictated mostly by the largest constituent in your recipe. In this case the Light DME. The grains you do have will provide reasonable darkening, but the light DME will weigh heavily in this case. For beers like Porter, feel free to use Dark or Amber DME.

Using the Beer Tools recipe generator would eliminate this error in color compliance

[slothrob]

That recipe should give you a color right at the top of the color range (30 SRM) for a Brown Porter, which is a dark brown, but not black like a stout.

You shouldn't need to use Dark extract to make dark beers. Many people avoid them because they tend to have a lot of unfermentable sugars and can leave the beer a little sweet.

[Graeme]

Thanks for the tips guys, noted. As long as this one tastes good I will be happy.

[deafcone]

I went to beer tools and using a brown porter recipe calculation I entered all your ingredients and it appears to be within all the specs except the TG should be about 1.008 - 1.014.

I am assuming you are using a 6 gallon US recipe. If you are using an airlock is there any activity? If not what is the temperature? Some people have warmed up their fermentors to restart stalled fermentation. What was your OG? The color shown on the beer tools indicates a brown to reddish brown hue also.

DC