You may have noticed that the one pound pouches of Syrup from Candi Syrup, Inc. used to say (for example) "°L 180" for the D-180 product, and so on. The same product now says 180 SRM. Of course, °L is usually associated with ingredients and SRM with finished beers. I have always suspected that the Candi Syrup value was actually the SRM as if the syrup itself were a finished beer, and the change to "SRM" on the packaging seemed to support that. So I contacted the company and learned that the value is in fact based from a spectrophotometer reading using 430nm, the same wavelength used to measure beer SRM. So, armed with that fact, and the relative weight and volume of the product, I crunched some numbers a couple of different ways, and came up with the following ingredient Lovibond values to use in brewing software calculations when adding Candi Syrup to the "grain bill." These values will be included in the upcoming V6 of BrewCipher. Posting here in case non-BC users can get some use from the data. D-180: 88L D-90: 32L D-45: 12L D-5 (Golden): 0.5L D-1 (Simplicity): 0.05L
Thanks VikeMan, this can be useful. I think you should be nominated for the Sherlock Holmes Investigative Award for your ability to use logic and acute observations to get to the bottom of things. Do I have moderator support?
Great work! this is something I have been trying to figure out and add into brewcipher while I could. A special signature that incorporates a deerstalker and beer is in order.
I have to admit to confusion and ignorance. Several sources had led me to think of SRM and Lovibond as essentially interchangeable. I gather they aren't? Or maybe they are in the broad operational sense that I use them in my brewhouse, because predicting beer color has some gray areas? Adding to my confusion is Beersmith's use of SRM for grains, and many of the pre-loaded grains suggest equivalence: Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (60 SRM) Optical illusion?
When you're talking about a finished beer (or wort), SRM and Lovibond are basically the same at low values, but they diverge at higher (darker) values. But SRM per se is not really applicable to solid ingredients (like malts), since nobody actually measures them that way, and in fact, it's not possible. What's important is what they, after dilution, contribute to the final beer color. It's fair enough to measure SRM for a liquid ingredient (e.g. syrup), because you can do the 430nm spectrograph thing on them. But that SRM value isn't very useful for brewers. It doesn't tell you what a pound (for instance) of the syrup does to your beer color. Why not? Well, how much syrup (by volume) is in that pound? The syrup's SRM is independent of its own volume. So we've added a pound, but a pound of what? We need a Lovibond value to be able to treat that syrup like a malt in the computation, i.e. to know what a particular weight of syrup into a particular volume of wort/beer will do. If you're interested in the methods I used to come up with the candi syrup values, let me know. There are calculators out there to convert SRM to Lov and vice versa, but they won't give you the right answer for this problem. They are fine for (volume independent) finished beer though.
Too late to edit above, so adding here. As a demonstration, try this: In your brewing software, enter D-180 as a new ingredient, and give it 88 Lov (or 88 "SRM" if that's what your software calls it.) Now make a batch with nothing but D-180. Set all loss type parameters to 0...Boil Length, Dead Spaces, etc. You want to use One Gallon of D-180 to make One Gallon of wort (i.e. no added water). One gallon of D-180 weighs 12.30769 pounds, so enter that (12.30769) as your D-180 amount. You should see a resulting wort/beer SRM of 180.
So where might this put something like molasses or dark treacle? Guides I've seen say to use 80L for molasses and 100L for black treacle, but these valuations may need lowering also. ??? Ditto standard wildflower honey or maple syrup... ???
I think the values commonly in use for these ingredients are pretty reasonable. But the only way to really find out would be to measure SRM with a spectrophotometer, weigh a known volume, and then do the math. Any chemists/lab guys out there have one?
