Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Ruggedized Color Measurement For Beer, Wort, And Malt, Roger Barth, Randall H. Reiger, Yuki Kim

Chemistry Faculty Publications

The standard instrument for measuring malt, wort, and beer color is the spectrophotometer. Spectrophotometers are not rugged; they have critically aligned collimators, monochromators, lenses, slits, and mirrors that make them difficult to use and maintain in a production environment. Our research shows that wort and beer color can be measured accurately with rugged equipment based on light emitting diodes (LEDs) with results in agreement with those of a spectrophotometer. Two or more colored diodes were used. LED-based apparatus does not require critical alignment, is not highly sensitive to environmental conditions such as temperature, moisture, dust, and vibration, and can be …