Okay, so a chap at the brewstore put together a kit for me to make a Red Irish Ale, and my prediction is that it will be absolutely tops. HOWEVER, next I want to make a Red Lager - there is a particular Australian brand I want to kind of copy "Rooftop Red Lager" - I know how to get some of the tastes right, ie. I'm going to use a lot of Crystal Malts and Hersbrucker Hops, but I have no idea how to make it a Red colour.

Keeping in mind that I'm going to use a pre-made base (my kitchen is not big enough to do all grain and I lack some of the equipment at the moment.) is there anything that will bring out some nice redness? For the Red Ale I'm doing there is about 100grams of grain that I just have to boil for 30mins and strain into the other ingredients. is this the kind of thing that will bring out a certain colour? I could really do with some help on this because while I have mucked around with different methods before I haven't done too much experimenting with ingredients.



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I just made a Irish Red and it was a hit. Of course I severely screwed up during boil and misjudged my pre-boil(Was in rush) and only had 4gallons in keg. I think I am down to my last 2-3 beers.sniff sniff

Crystal and caramel malts will impart a redish hue to your beer.

To use simple crack the malt with a rollng pin and place in the brew kettle filled with cold or warm water when you are just starting up.

Heat the water and remove the grain with a strainer once the temperature reaches around 165 F (74 C). At temperatures above ~168 F the tannins from the grain husks tend to be extracted which may produce an unpleasant astringency in the finished beer.

I hope this heps.

- Scott

Thanx, I was actually worried about pulling the wrong flavours out of things with the wrong tempreture, I think I have the idea now.

That will do the trick!! The more crystal & the higher the lovibond the more redness you will get.
So a crystal 15 is not much but crystal 70 will be redder than the 15.
If you go to www.beertools.com it will show you the color of the brew.