"shade of brown" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it in a sentence to refer to a specific hue or tone of the color brown. For example: "The fence was painted a dark shade of brown."
A rich and beautiful shade of brown.
Almost everything around Tirin Kot is some shade of brown.
Solid-coloured dogs may be black or any shade of brown.
Her hair was curly and long, and she was tanned a Brazil-nut shade of brown.
True, they're all big, and they're all about the same shade of brown.
Nothing I have ever painted red has turned that particular shade of brown two years later.
He is in his seventies but seems much younger; his graying hair is dyed a deep shade of brown.
And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray or purple.
I hope they find it, but right now the vista is mostly an ugly shade of brown.
But then another N-word was once commonly used in clothes catalogues to describe a chocolatey shade of brown.
The novel is a study of a marriage -- a brown study, in an unpleasant shade of brown.
