Colour names like "gold" or "amber" get used loosely in casual conversation, but they correspond to fairly specific SRM ranges in brewing literature — this page maps the common naming convention to real numbers and a real style example for each, computed through the same SRM colour calculator this site runs everywhere else.
The naming convention
| Name | Approx. SRM | Hex | Example style |
|---|---|---|---|
| Straw | 2-3 | #FFD878 | American light lager |
| Pale gold | 4-6 | #FFBF42 | German pils |
| Gold | 6-9 | #FFA032 | American pale ale |
| Amber | 9-14 | #E58A1F | American amber ale |
| Deep amber/light brown | 14-20 | #A85C10 | Brown porter |
| Brown | 20-29 | #6B3612 | Robust porter |
| Dark brown | 29-35 | #3D1E0E | Dry Irish stout |
| Black | 35+ | #140B06 | Russian imperial stout |
A worked example: a mostly-pale amber-ale grain bill (4.1 kg base malt at 2°L plus 0.5 kg crystal at 40°L, in a 19 L batch) computes to roughly 8.4 SRM — squarely in the "gold" band, right at the edge of "amber." Run this exact grain bill to see the actual swatch it renders.
Why the bands overlap the way they do
These ranges are approximate on purpose — colour perception isn't a hard cutoff, and two beers a couple of SRM points apart on either side of a boundary look nearly identical side by side, while the same numeric gap at the pale end of the scale (say, 3 to 6 SRM) is much more visually obvious. Treat the names as a rough vocabulary for describing a computed SRM value in conversation, not as a precise classification system — brewing competitions and style guidelines score colour by the actual SRM number or a visual swatch comparison, not by which name it falls under.
If you need a genuinely comparable printed swatch
This chart names bands rather than giving a swatch for every individual SRM value — for that, see the SRM swatch reference chart, which lists a swatch and hex code at every commonly-referenced SRM stop from 1 through 40 for matching against your own beer, with the caveat that no two screens render colour identically and a printed or in-person comparison is always more reliable than a monitor.
If your grain bill computes to a noticeably different colour than you expected from its ingredients, the site's SRM calculator documentation is upfront about what the underlying Morey equation doesn't model — see why is my beer darker than expected for the process factors a colour formula alone can't capture.