SRM Beer Color (Morey)

About this calculator

The Morey equation estimates a beer’s color on the SRM (Standard Reference Method) scale from its grain bill: SRM = 1.4922 x (MCU^0.6859), where MCU (malt color units) equals grain weight in lbs times grain color in degrees Lovibond, divided by batch volume in gallons, summed across all grains in the recipe. The exponent corrects for the fact that color doesn’t scale linearly with malt color contribution at the darker end.

Homebrewers and craft brewers use SRM to predict what a beer will look like before brewing it — a pale lager sits around 2-3 SRM, an amber ale around 10-17, and a stout can run 30+ SRM (effectively opaque black past about 40) — which matters both for matching a style’s guidelines (BJCP style ranges reference SRM) and for choosing a grain bill that hits a target appearance. It’s a standard field in recipe-building software like BeerSmith and Brewer’s Friend.

This calculator takes your grain weights, their Lovibond color ratings and your batch volume and returns the predicted SRM using the Morey formula.