Hydrometer readings.

When you take a reading on your hydrometer do you HAVE to use the tube it comes with or can u sanitize the hydrometer itself and put it in the beer to get a reading...

You can.....but it's a little hard to get a reading from looking down. I find it easier to sanitize my turkey baster and simply pull out a sample and use the hydrometer tube.

As long as the hydro is floating, you're good to go.

I tried something new this week - I have a 5 gallon boil pot, but do extract. The last batch was about 3 1/2 gallons at chilling time. I added my top-off water to the boil pot (filling it completely) instead of the carboy. It seemed logical to me - Add to carboy or add to pot, it's still the same volume at the same time right?!? I just dropped the hydro in the cooled boil pot! No tubes or thief needed.
Then racked it to the fermenter. I'll still use the thief later on for checking the progress, but the OG check was a breeze!

yea cause I took a reading before bottling last week and it was at the level "beer""finished" on the hydrometer so I was fine.

That would make me a little nervous...
Typically, to find out if your yeast is through with your beer, you want to take a couple gravity readings a couple days apart. If they read the same, you're done. If the gravity is still dropping, they're still eating the sugar.

Yea I did that... three days apart . Sorry should have stated that.

No worries!
Bottle bombs are bad Just though I'd mention it

I have a wine thief, but I don't use it. I just move the bubbles out of the way and drop the hydro right into the fermentation bucket. I figure that it is easier to sanitize the hydrometer than the wine thief. It is harder to read, but I don't worry too much about being off by a couple of thousanths.

Or you could do what i do. Just spend like $6 and get a test jar like this one and but a drilled cap on it and let it ferment with the rest of your beer right next to it or on top of it and just take reading out of that.

You could drop it in your pot and take a reading but ........................

depending on the temp of your wort at the time you may not get an accurate reading. I pull a sample so it can cool down to 70ish. Plus then I get to drink a sample jar full of hoppy sugar water.

yeast_infection said:

You could drop it in your pot and take a reading but ........................

depending on the temp of your wort at the time you may not get an accurate reading. I pull a sample so it can cool down to 70ish. Plus then I get to drink a sample jar full of hoppy sugar water.

Click to expand...

True, just remember that that only works if you do a full boil. If you add top off water, you'll have to know how much water you added and manually calculate the real OG