The Color Brown, Beer, Brewing and the Colorimeter

Third in an ongoing series of excerpts from Victoria Finlay’s book: Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Brown is in a curious nonposition in terms of color hierarchy. It is certainly a color ­— more so that black is, or white — but like pink it has no place in the spectrum. It was, however, the need to distinguish specifically between different brown colors which lead to the world’s first colorimeter. Joseph Lovibond was an Englishman who will be remembered for two things: his pioneering work with colors and the terrible moment when, as a teenager who had just made a fortune in the gold fields of South Australia, he waved too enthusiastically to the friends he left behind on the wharf and all his money spun out of his hat and into the Sydney Harbor. Poor once again, he returned home and joined his father and two brothers in the family brewing business. He began to realize that the variations in color of his different brews were a good guide to their quality, but he found there was no established way of categorizing them — he needed some kind of graded scale. He tried different pigments, painting them on to a card and holding them up next to the beer. But they were unreliable and tended to fade, and anyway, how do you compare a liquid against a paint? Inspiration to improving the world’s beer quality arrived one day in church. Lovibond was attending a service at Salisbury Cathedral, and suddenly realized the answer lay in finding the right shades of brown stained glass as a standard against which to compare the colors of his amber-colored brew. Five years later, in 1885, he produced the first colorimeter, with a scale of many different kinds of brown, and later adapted it, in the form of the Lovibond Color Scale, to measure the three primary hues, red, blue, yellow, and so revolutionized color testing.

— Victoria Finlay
excerpted from her book: Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Visit her website: victoriafinlay.com and fnd out more about graphic design and architectural color at: studioconover.com