WHAT IS THE EBC OF BEER?

In this article we explain what the EBC nomenclature is and what it is used for in beer. Learn interesting facts about beer here at Consum.

Julio Cerezo - Beer Sommelier
Director of Sabeer Beer Academy

The Spanish brewing sector has undergone sustained growth in recent years, not so much because of the volume of beer that is consumed, but rather because of the variety of beers being produced and greater knowledge of beer drinkers about styles, ingredients and the brewing process.
Consequently, some terms that were previously restricted to professional brewers are now being used in more general conversations among beer lovers, or at least on the content of many of the labels. EBC is one of them, perhaps not the most popular which would perhaps be the IBU which measures the quantity of bitter substances by volume of beer.

So what exactly does EBC mean?

In order to explain it, we first need to know what the initials EBC actually stand for, i.e. “European Brewery Convention”, which is the system used in most countries around the world to measure the colour of beer.
Different systems were used to measure colour in the past, from simple personal observation and descriptions (golden, pale, red, dark, black beer, etc.) to systems such as the Lovibond system which was based on the use of numbered coloured glass discs to compare with each beer and to assign a score. In both cases human intervention and perception played a role, and the different light conditions also led to inaccuracies in the results.
Today, an optical spectrometer is used to assign the EBC score to a beer, which works by measuring the interaction of a light wave through a liquid. The more light the beer absorbs, the higher the EBC score. Consequently, if the light passes through the liquid with hardly any losses, the EBC will be very low.

Although the main purpose of measuring the EBC is for the brewery itself, we can use the score to get an idea of the colour of a beer that we are not familiar with.

As a rough guide, golden lager, which is the most widely consumed beer in Spain, usually has an EBC score under 10. One of the popular toasted lagers will be around 20, whereas a dark stout such as Guinness will be 85. Above this figure are the brewing styles known as Imperial Stout, whose score can be over 130.

Although the EBC system is known all over the world, a different system is used in the USA, namely the SRM or Standard Reference Method. This system uses the same technology, but it assigns different values to the measurements, although they are proportional to the EBC scores. So to convert the score from SRM to EBC, we just need to multiply it by 1.97.