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Rum ranges dramatically in color, clarity, and flavor, from clear as water and virtually tasteless to deep brown and rich in complex flavors. In fact, you can often tell a great deal about the flavor profile and quality of rum simply by looking at the color and clarity of the liquid inside of the bottle. This is why most rum producers distill, filter, and age their rum carefully in order to achieve the perfect appearance. However, a multitude of factors affects the appearance of rum before it is bottled, potentially compromising both the look and taste of the product. For example, if the rum spends too much time in the barrel or it hasn’t been filtered enough, then it may not be as rich in color or as clear as the producer would like and the taste may not be what customers expect.  

In order to achieve correct and consistent appearance of rums, many manufacturers are turning to spectrophotometric technology. Whether you want to create perfect clarity in a bottle of light rum or you need to ensure that your dark spiced rum is the same shade of amber after it’s removed from the barrel, spectrophotometers can help you reach your goals.

Peanut butter has a uniquely American history and consumers have strong preferences for how peanut butter should look. Image Source: Flickr user Denise Krebs

When I lived in London, one of the things I missed most about the United States was peanut butter. Yes, there was peanut butter in the UK, but it was different and it wasn’t the sort of difference you could look past. And, as I came to find out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. In fact, American peanut butter was a hot commodity; whenever someone would go home on holiday or have visitors from the US, we would put in our peanut butter orders and wait impatiently until we could get our hands on what we knew and loved.

It makes sense that Americans have a unique relationship with peanut butter. It was, after all, John Harvey Kellogg, a physician and vegetarian, who began giving his patients nut butters in the 1890s to provide them with a healthy, easy-to-eat source of protein.1 Simultaneously, he began supplying peanut grinders to health food stores, allowing a relatively small market of niche, expensive peanut butters to flourish.

Mass commercialization, however, didn’t happen until the 1920s, when Joseph Rosefield introduced the use of hydrogenated fat in the peanut butter manufacturing process, preventing oil separation and drastically increasing the appeal of the product. Rosefield’s invention came just in time; “as the scarcity of meat [during WWII] required citizens and soldiers to seek protein alternatives.”2 From that point on, peanut butter took off. Today Americans spend over $1.8 billion on peanut butter annually – more than any other nation in the world – and over half of peanuts grown in the United States are destined to be made into peanut butter.3

This history is noteworthy because it informs how Americans approach peanut butter and guides the purchasing decisions of consumers. Peanut butter is not seen as an exotic food eaten on rare occasion, but as a staple that is consumed throughout life, something we remember from our grade school lunch boxes, something we eat as comfort food, and something that has become inextricably linked to our culture. It is familiar and beloved. As such, consumers have very specific expectations of peanut butter products and strong preferences regarding what it should taste, look, and smell like, preferences that have typically been ingrained from childhood. The color of peanut butter in particular is of utmost importance when it comes to influencing consumer choice and experience.

The color of peanut butter is an important indicator of quality and reflect both the quality of raw ingredients and correctness of processing.
Image Source: Pexels user stock.tookapic.com

Stout is so opaque that its red hues take on a rich, deep brown color. Image Credit: Flickr user a.dombrowski

My best friend is a diehard IPA fan and up until recently, I’d never seen her drink anything darker than a red ale. Whenever I’d offer her a taste of Guinness, she’d always shake her head and say, “Dark beer is too heavy and bitter.” One day, I decided to take her to one of Portland’s annual beer festivals, hoping I could change her mind about dark brews. When we got there, the festival’s dark beer list alone boasted close to 100 separate labels, ranging from porter to stout. After a lot of persuasions, she agreed to try the black lager that I recommended. She took a sip, raised her eyebrows in surprise and said, “I had no idea that dark beer could taste this light!”

Beer opacity has a massive impact on how drinkers perceive your brew’s flavors. Your customers usually look at the color of the brew and how translucent it is before they consider any other factor like smell or taste. That’s why it’s so important for breweries to ensure that the opacity of their beer matches its traditional style, giving customers the best impression before they take their first sip.

Why is Stout So Opaque?

Like coffee, beer opacity often comes from how long you roast the ingredients. Generally, a dark roast will give you an opaque, almost jet black beer that tastes like coffee or chocolate, whereas a light roast will give you a golden, translucent color and “breadier” flavors. However, it’s not always this simple. If your brewery uses black patent malt1, you’ll also get a dark opacity in the final brew, but the flavors will be completely different than a heavily roasted barley beer. Stout brewers use trace amounts of black patent malt to give the beer a deeper color while retaining light, bready flavors underneath. This is why that black lager that my friend tried tastes more like a Belgian pale ale than a frothy glass of chocolatey stout — the opacity of the beer has little to do with how it actually tastes.

How long you roast the barley and the type of malt you use can impact the beer’s opacity. Image Credit: Flickr CC user Dylan Stark

Interior designers typically match the color of kitchen appliances in order to make a kitchen appear more cohesive. Image Source: Pixnio

A few years ago, an appliance manufacturer sent out a shipment of color-coordinated washers and dryers to a major retailer. But when the shipment of products arrived, the retailer noticed a serious problem: the appliance pairs didn’t appear to be the same color at all. This complaint puzzled the manufacturer; they had visually assessed their products carefully during manufacturing and found that each pair of appliances was perfectly color-coordinated. So why did the retailer see a clear difference in color between the washers and the dryers?

It turns out that neither the manufacturer nor the retailer was entirely wrong in their visual color assessments. The manufacturer was assessing the color of the washers and dryers under incandescent lighting, while the retailer was looking at the products under the store’s fluorescent lighting. In incandescent lighting conditions, the products appeared perfectly matched, but under fluorescent lighting, they appeared to be two completely different colors. This phenomenon is called metamerism, and it’s a common challenge for appliance manufacturers.

Metamerism occurs when two different colors appear to be the same under certain lighting conditions and not the same in others. When you’re trying to color-coordinate household appliances, metamerism can be frustrating and potentially costly; if you fail to identify the phenomenon during manufacturing, you may end up shipping mismatched products to your customers or having to repaint or recoat all of your products.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution to this problem. By using a spectrophotometer that is capable of measuring color reliably and accurately, you can easily detect metamerism before products reach customers and even before products enter mass manufacturing. Spectrophotometers use advanced spectral analysis to calculate  the exact color of a product under different lighting conditions, offering you a truly accurate measurement for every color-coordinated appliance in your line.

Under certain lighting conditions, a washer and dryer might appear to be the same color, even if they are actually different. Image Source: Flickr user Christian Brothers

Plastic plaques are the basis of industry standards when manufacturing and developing colored plastic products. Quality perception in the plastic industry is significantly impacted by color consistency between product manufacturing and development. In high-volume production, customer satisfaction is dependent on maintaining color consistency and uniformity from the production line to consumer usage.

Plastic manufacturing and production depends on advanced color measurement systems to maintain consistency and quality in product development. Image Source: Flickr user Dave Bleasdale

The process of pressing plastic plaques is necessary for creating a standard for color selection in sample materials. However, maintaining color consistency between pressed samples and raw pellet materials requires the use of advanced technology and color measurement instrumentation. As materials are pressed and heated, it is important to use the right instrumentation to maintain color consistency between each sample and projected product color development. By understanding spectral analysis and utilizing the appropriate geometries and tools, color consistency and consumer satisfaction are attainable.

The Ultra-Scan VIS can accurately measure carpet color because it takes texture into account. Image source: Pixabay user Frantisek_Krejci

A hotel chain has hired an interior designer to replace the old carpet design in every guestroom with something that looks more sleek and modern. After sifting through a number of swatches, the designer finds the perfect shade: a simple charcoal grey design that will contrast beautifully against the crisp white comforters and bed sheets that the hotel uses. But in order for the interior designer’s vision to truly come to life, the carpet color needs to be consistent from room to room. Not only does every guest room have to match, the hotel also needs to ensure that the carpeting looks seamless from the entrance of the room to every corner. If the hotel receives rolls of carpeting that vary in color even slightly, it will make every seam more obvious–the hotel will end up with a room that looks more like a patchwork quilt than a chic, modern space (commonly referred to as a “carpet sidematch problem”).1

This is just one of many reasons carpet manufacturers should take accurate color measurements of their products before releasing them on the market. However, it isn’t always easy to measure carpet color, even when you use color measurement tools like spectrophotometers. Because carpeting is soft, uneven and not always entirely opaque, analyzing the color of your samples can be frustratingly complicated. An instrument such as the UltraScan VIS, however, simplifies this process by allowing for optimal measurement methodology and the highest degree of color measurement precision. Unlike many other spectrophotometers on the market, the UltraScan VIS instrument is specifically designed to measure carpeting (among many other sample types), and makes the color quality control process fast, simple and extremely accurate.  

The Challenges of Analyzing Carpet Color

Carpet swatches seem easy to analyze at first glance, especially when designs feature just one solid color. However, carpeting is never truly “solid” in color, even if it appears so to the naked eye. If you look carefully at any carpet swatch, you’ll see that the tiny particles that make up the sample frequently vary in opacity, shape, and color. These three factors pose a number of challenges for manufacturers.   

Challenge #1: Opacity

Opacity is one of the first challenges you’ll come across when you try to measure the color of your sample using a spectrophotometer. Many carpet products are slightly translucent, and this becomes more obvious when you change the backing of your sample. For instance, your slightly translucent carpet sample will look lighter when backed by a light-colored background, but that same sample will appear much darker when backed by a dark-colored background. In order to get an accurate measurement, you have to standardize your sample backing.

Challenge #2: Shape

Carpeting isn’t flat. Rather, the material is flexible, and the tiny threads that make up the sample can shift with even the slightest pressure. The non-homogenous nature of carpeting makes it difficult to measure color unless you use tools specifically designed to handle textured samples. When a color measurement instrument presses into a carpet swatch, it creates a pillowing effect. The tiny carpet particles bend around the instrument’s measurement port, and this in turn can cast shadows that alter the overall color reading. To fix this, you need to take several readings in succession, then average those readings to get an accurate measurement.

Challenge #3: Color

Finally, the color of your sample or the type of dye that you use can cause a few unexpected problems for color measurement instruments. The most common problem that you may come across is the use of fluorescent dye in carpeting. This dye makes the product appear brighter and whiter than it is, and it is frequently used in white carpeting.2 Although this dye makes your products look whiter and potentially more appealing, it also makes your samples more sensitive to UV light. When your sample is exposed to the UV that naturally occurs in your light source, it can alter the overall measurement result, making your product appear lighter. This is why you need to cancel out the impact of UV on your sample or take UV into account when you measure your product’s color.

Pile heights and texture can significantly affect the appearance of your carpet samples. Image Source: Unsplash user Dane Deaner

The Grey Change scale can help detect the amount of fading that occurs in different textiles after they’re washed. Image Source: Max Pixel

A homeowner decided to wash a set of red living room curtains for the very first time, carefully following the cleaning instructions listed on the label. He avoided bleach products and washed the curtains on the delicate cycle setting. But despite his diligence, the color nonetheless faded significantly after washing; his once-red curtains were now a shade of faded pink, and they no longer matched the color scheme of the living room.

This is a common challenge that textile manufacturers face, whether they’re dyeing textiles for curtains, blankets, clothing or any other colorful fabric. If a large-scale textile manufacturer fails to identify problems with fading or color bleeding in its products early on, it could lead to customer dissatisfaction later. Yet there is a solution to this problem. Using the Grey Change and Grey Stain color scales, which are included in the software packaged with some advanced spectrophotometers, textile manufacturers can identify both fading and bleeding early on in the dyeing process. These two color scales are specifically designed to analyze color fastness and dye durability, allowing manufacturers to refine their dyeing processes and invest in the most durable dyes for their products.

The Problem with Some Colorful Textile Dyes

Certain textile dyes are more prone to fading and bleeding than others and environmental factors like exposure to UV rays or frequent washing can significantly alter product color depending on the chemical makeup of the dye.1 This is why textile manufacturers must consider the color fastness of the dye being used for each product, as different types of dyes will have different benefits and downsides.

The term “color fastness” refers to a dye’s durability against fading and bleeding; a dye that has excellent color fastness will be durable and long-lasting, even when exposed to environmental factors that cause color fading or bleeding. A dye with poor color fastness won’t be as durable. For instance, one type of dye that is known for its excellent color fastness is an azoic or naphthol dye.2 These dyes produce bright, bold colors, especially in the red and orange spectrum, and are highly resistant to fading in the wash or even when exposed to bleach. Conversely, acidic dyes tend to be resistant to color fading when they’re exposed to sunlight, but they’re much more prone to fading and bleeding after washing. Here are a few more examples of common textile dyes and their typical color fastness:

• Basic: Excellent light and wash fastness.
• Disperse: Good light and wash fastness, but sensitive to nitrogen gas.
• Direct: Fair lightfastness, but very poor wash fastness.
• Reactive: Great light and wash fastness, but prone to bleeding excess dye unless it’s washed well during manufacturing.
• Mordant: Good light and wash fastness, but only available in a small range of colors.
• Premetallized: Good light and wash fastness, but only available in a small range of colors.
• Sulphur: Fair light and wash fastness.
• Vat: Excellent color and wash fastness. It’s perhaps the most durable textile dye used by manufacturers.
• Fluorescent brighteners: Fair wash fastness, but very poor lightfastness.

While this basic list of color fastness can give you a general idea of which textile dyes will be the best choice for your textile products, the list isn’t foolproof. For example, although sulphur dye is generally fairly resistant against color fading after being washed or exposed to sunlight, some manufacturers have found that certain sulphur-dyed yarns will occasionally fade after about six months of use. This is why it’s important to test your dyes for true color fastness using the Grey Change and Grey Stain scales; every dye reacts differently with each fabric you use, so by testing each new product in advance, you may produce more durable, colorful textiles.

Textile dyes vary in color fastness depending on the chemical makeup of the dye or the type of fabric that a manufacturer uses. Image Source: Shutterstock user Pichit Tongma