Hydrometer 101

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VAShooter

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Can someone explain, in laymans terms, how to calculate OG / FG? My kit doesnt have very good instructions re: the hydrometer.

Another question is that I forgot to take an OG reading From what I've read so far....without the OG reading I wont be able to calculate an FG either....correct?

Thanks for the help!
 
There's no calculating involved in OG or in FG. You derive your alcohol content by comparing OG and FG, so you might have a bit of trouble with that. The good news is that in an extract batch it is difficult to miss the OG of the recipe by much. So long as you used all the ingredients and you used the right amount of water, your OG is close to whatever the recipe designers said it should be.

Here's a video on using a hydrometer:
 
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OK - I took a reading last night at 1.012. - Brewed Friday night - racked to seconday on Sunday night. ( Airlock had stopped - kit said to rack once stopped). I know not to rely on air locks anymore after reading comments from Revvy and others.

So....my instructions call for OG - 1.049 - 1.051 and FG 1.016 - 1.018

Again, I didn't take an OG reading Friday but took a reading last night out of curiosity I am currently at 1.012 as of last night.

Any thoughts?
 
OK - I took a reading last night at 1.012. - Brewed Friday night - racked to seconday on Sunday night. ( Airlock had stopped - kit said to rack once stopped). I know not to rely on air locks anymore after reading comments from Revvy and others.

So....my instructions call for OG - 1.049 - 1.051 and FG 1.016 - 1.018

Again, I didn't take an OG reading Friday but took a reading last night out of curiosity I am currently at 1.012 as of last night.

Any thoughts?

That's a bit lower than I would have expected, but not crazy. Now the hard part is to just walk away from it for at least another two weeks. If you get a hydrometer reading right before you bottle at around 1.012, you're good to go.

What kind of kit? I'm always curious to see who is recommending secondaries these days.
 
It's a kit form my local shop. Doing an Amber Ale. I think it's geared towards new brewers ( like me ). It's more follow the air lock and move to the next step from there. After discovering thsi site I now realize teh importance of the hydrometer but I'm not comfortable what the hydrometer is telling me.

So being new...one question leads to another. The instructions state FG 1.016 -1.018 but your saying I'm good to go in 2 weeks at 1.012? My OG range was to be 1.049 so if I'm already at 1.012 havent I blown past the reccomended 1.016-1.018?

I'm certainly interested in skipping the secondary but isn't it reccomeneded for dry hopping / adding fruits. etc? I'll be dry hopping.

Again - thanks for the help - I'm trying to get comfortable with what teh brew is trying to tell me! :mug:
 
That's a bit lower than I would have expected, but not crazy. Now the hard part is to just walk away from it for at least another two weeks. If you get a hydrometer reading right before you bottle at around 1.012, you're good to go.

What kind of kit? I'm always curious to see who is recommending secondaries these days.

FWIW my Brewer's best kit also recommended a secondary.

But I knew better thanks to HBT :D
 
It's a kit form my local shop. Doing an Amber Ale. I think it's geared towards new brewers ( like me ). It's more follow the air lock and move to the next step from there. After discovering thsi site I now realize teh importance of the hydrometer but I'm not comfortable what the hydrometer is telling me.

So being new...one question leads to another. The instructions state FG 1.016 -1.018 but your saying I'm good to go in 2 weeks at 1.012? My OG range was to be 1.049 so if I'm already at 1.012 havent I blown past the reccomended 1.016-1.018?

I'm certainly interested in skipping the secondary but isn't it reccomeneded for dry hopping / adding fruits. etc? I'll be dry hopping.

Again - thanks for the help - I'm trying to get comfortable with what teh brew is trying to tell me! :mug:

You did go past your expected FG, but with extra emphasis on expected. Yeast is weird, and there are a billion and one factors that can influence the course of a fermentation. As you get more experienced, you'll have a better sense for this, but you'll never be able to predict it entirely. There are plenty of factors that could have caused you to go past an expected FG, which include (but aren't limited to) warm temperatures, errors in measurement, miscalculations in recipe design, and (my personal favorite) inexplicable weirdness. If you start drifting south of 1.008, then it's worth having another conversation about what might be happening.

I'm not as anti-secondary as some people on here, but it strikes me as an advanced technique. It seems unnecessarily complicated for most people's first brews. I'm not much of a dry-hopper, so I'll leave the question of whether it's better to dry hop in a secondary to people with more experience, but you certainly can dry hop in a primary.

Fruits are a completely different story, of course, and are a great example of when a secondary is probably smart. But there, it actually is a secondary fermentation because you are adding a second round of sugars. In anything else, a second vessel is more accurately called a brightening tank.

Fermentation is typically done in a manner of days, but you typically want to leave your beer for an additional couple of weeks to let the beer "clean up". If you're having trouble with the hydrometer, you can get used to it by making sugar solutions. One pound of sugar in 1 gallon of water should give you a hydrometer reading of about 1.046. You can scale that up or down to give you a test solution. Doubling the amount of sugar will double your reading to 1.092, halving it will halve your reading to 1.023. With a bit of experience, hydrometers get easier to read.
 
Thanks for the info. So you suggest waiting for 2 weeks until taking another reading?

Talk about steps! My kit is a PITA process. So from the secondary I'm suppose to dry hop and rack back to the bucket again before bottling. So by the time it's all said and done I'll have racked 3 separate times, primary, secondary, and back to bucket for bottling. Seems risky when sanitation is such a big deal.

I've read a bunch about how the secondary is not usually necessary but I'd like to understand a bit more about the benefits of skipping the secondary.
Is it as simple as racking to Primary - checking OG - Add yeast, sit back and wait?

Typically how long until I check FG and am ready to bottle?

Are the benefits of skipping the secondary only to reduce risk of bacteria and eliminating an unecessary step?

Is the fermnet / conditioning time reduced if only using a primary?

Just seeing if the overall benefit is to reduce risk by eliminating a step....

Like I said - One Question leads to another! cheers.
 
If you brewed an extract kit, it is extremely difficult to miss your OG. It can only be missed if you didn't get all of the extract into the wort, or you didn't top up to the appropriate volume (i.e. going into primary with more or less than 5 gallons of wort).

You can assume with relative confidence that your OG was around 1.05 if you used an extract kit. take that number, go to this website: http://www.brewersfriend.com/abv-calculator/ plug it in and there you go, you got your ABV.

Does that answer your question? it is a calculation off of the delta between OG and FG. that's all.
 
Is it as simple as racking to Primary - checking OG - Add yeast, sit back and wait?
yes, you can make it as easy or challengining as you like

Typically how long until I check FG and am ready to bottle? 3 weeks is standard, more for a big (high OG beer)

Are the benefits of skipping the secondary only to reduce risk of bacteria and eliminating an unecessary step? this and it adds a pita step that many have found doesn't really matter unless you are dry hopping or adding fruit - which is another topic all together

Is the fermnet / conditioning time reduced if only using a primary? no

Just seeing if the overall benefit is to reduce risk by eliminating a step....

Like I said - One Question leads to another! cheers.

keep asking questions, also, try using the search function at the top right - most anything that you can think of regarding homebrewing has been tackled on this website.
 
Right on - Thanks Phatuna.

Generally speaking, what is the line between big beer / mid / small beer when referring to an OG level?

I guess my bucket (primary) is sitting around useless right now so I need to do something about that soon and start a pipeline. I just need to make sure I dont start a brew that requires dry hopping or fruit.
 
I'd just like to toss in another point about the OG. One thing that can cause a big variation in your OG (and then of course your FG) is how much of your wort gets into your fermenter before you top it up with water.

If, for example, me and you brew the exact same extract batch, and we both have 4 gallons left in the pot at the end of our boil, and I only get 3 gallons into my fermenter (the other gallon is left in the kettle because of the trub, some of it gets spilled because the hose on my siphon is too short and the end of it gets pulled up out of my fermenter when I try to start the siphon, etc etc...) and you get 3.5 gallons, then we both top our fermenters off to 5 gallons (or a little more) we will end up with a different OG.
 
The main benefit to racking to the secondary is to clarify your beer without all the trub at the bottom. The longer your beer sits on the trub the more off-flavors will be created. If you want to skip the secondary (and dry-hopping) that is always an option, but practicing good sanitation will help you in the long run.
 
The main benefit to racking to the secondary is to clarify your beer without all the trub at the bottom. The longer your beer sits on the trub the more off-flavors will be created. If you want to skip the secondary (and dry-hopping) that is always an option, but practicing good sanitation will help you in the long run.

You must be new here :D

The idea that trub -> off flavors is a very popular whipping boy around these parts. There are approximately infinity billion threads debating the issue, but the general consensus is that you are incorrect in that claim. Otherwise, welcome to HBT :ban:
 
you may want to calibrate your hydrometer in 60deg distilled h2o to make sure it's reading accurately

also need to make sure you are checking your SG at 60deg or use the chart for temperature adjustments

my hydrometer read 1.004 in distilled 60deg h2o so I subtract .004 from all readings now
 
Thanks for the info. So you suggest waiting for 2 weeks until taking another reading?

Talk about steps! My kit is a PITA process. So from the secondary I'm suppose to dry hop and rack back to the bucket again before bottling. So by the time it's all said and done I'll have racked 3 separate times, primary, secondary, and back to bucket for bottling. Seems risky when sanitation is such a big deal.

I've read a bunch about how the secondary is not usually necessary but I'd like to understand a bit more about the benefits of skipping the secondary.
Is it as simple as racking to Primary - checking OG - Add yeast, sit back and wait?

Typically how long until I check FG and am ready to bottle?

Are the benefits of skipping the secondary only to reduce risk of bacteria and eliminating an unecessary step?

Is the fermnet / conditioning time reduced if only using a primary?

Just seeing if the overall benefit is to reduce risk by eliminating a step....

Like I said - One Question leads to another! cheers.
Fermentation is done when the SG reading has not changed for 3 days, typically, and assuming it hasn't stalled for some reason.

You can dry hop in your primary.

You can bottle from your primary/secondary if you have a bottling cane and a siphon. You may want to rack your beer off of the sediment before bottling, but most siphons/autosiphons have a plastic piece that prevents the trub from going in the tube. I have bottled from my secondary that way.

Anytime you move your beer, you increase the POTENTIAL for something like that to happen. It doesn't mean you oxydize you beer by racking if you are careful, it's just that if you don't move your beer, your odds are even more decreased.

Having said that, there's been a shift in belief over the past few years, now most of us leave our beers in primary for a month rather than rack to a secondary, and find our beers are better for being on the yeast that time. And clearer.

Fermenting the beer is just a part of what the yeast do. If you leave the beer alone, they will go back and clean up the byproducts of fermentation that often lead to off flavors. That's why many brewers skip secondary and leave our beers alone in primary for a month. It leaves plenty of time for the yeast to ferment, clean up after themselves and then fall out, leveing our beers crystal clear, with a tight yeast cake.

If you leave the beer alone, they will go back and clean up the byproducts of fermentation that often lead to off flavors. That's why many brewers skip secondary and leave our beers alone in primary for a month. It leaves plenty of time for the yeast to ferment, clean up after themselves and then fall out, leveing our beers crystal clear, with a tight yeast cake.

This is the latest recommendation, it is the same one many of us have been giving for several years on here.



THIS is where the latest discussion and all your questions answered.
We have multiple threads about this all over the place, like this one,so we really don't need to go over it again, all the info you need is here;

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/secondary-not-john-palmer-jamil-zainasheff-weigh-176837/

We basically proved that old theory wrong on here 5 years ago, and now the rest fo the brewing community is catching up. Though a lot of old dogs don't tend to follow the latest news, and perpetuate the old stuff.

The autolysis from prolong yeast contact has fallen by the wayside, in fact yeast contact is now seen as a good thing.

All my beers sit a minimum of 1 month in the primary. And I recently bottled a beer that sat in primary for 5.5 months with no ill effects.....

You'll find that more and more recipes these days do not advocate moving to a secondary at all, but mention primary for a month, which is starting to reflect the shift in brewing culture that has occurred in the last 4 years, MOSTLY because of many of us on here, skipping secondary, opting for longer primaries, and writing about it. Recipes in BYO have begun stating that in their magazine. I remember the "scandal" it caused i the letters to the editor's section a month later, it was just like how it was here when we began discussing it, except a lot more civil than it was here. But after the Byo/Basic brewing experiment, they started reflecting it in their recipes.

But lots of folks do sry hop in primary these days. So the choice is yours.

:mug:



It took me two days of reading to get through the posts in that link, so I'll summarize what I gleaned - flavor and clarity will improve if you leave your beer on the trub for up to 4 weeks or even longer. Autolysis is not a concern for the home brewer since 5 gallon batches don't put the kind of pressure on the yeast that leads to this and newer yeasts are simply better. If you want to use a bucket, just use a bucket. If you want to use a carboy, use a 6.5 gallon or use a 5 gallon with a blow off tube.

Typically, kits will recommend "best case" or "fastest case" scenarios, 5-10 days ferment, 7 days clear, 2 weeks bottle. If you skip the secondary, don't care about clarity or flavor improvements, and have received 3 consecutive SG readings that are the same, you can bottle. In theory, this could be as soon as 3 or 4 days after the boil. Because clarity and flavor improve with a bit of aging on the trub, you could leave your beer in the primary up to 4 weeks before taking a reading and bottling.

Skipping the secondary is not done typically to reduce risk, rather for flavor and clarity improvements, but that is a benefit.

Fermenting time is unaffected by primary/secondary (although you could stall fermentation if it was not finished by racking to secondary). Revvy and others recommend leaving your beer in the primary for flavor and clarity improvement.

Bottling is kind of similar, 2 weeks is a "best case" - will likely be ready closer to 3 weeks. I'm impatient, so start stealing off beers here and there, but it usually takes at least 2 weeks before carbonation is complete.

Oh, and your original question :)

OG and FG are readings, ABV is a calculation
=((1.05 X (OF - FG)/(FG))/0.79)

+0.003 for 5 oz priming sugar
 
Thanks wyrmwood - I've spent waaaayyyy to much time reading over this today.....with that said - I'm sold. One thing I didnt find out is what happens to the krausen after a month? What do I do with it when I'm ready to bottlle? Is it still sitting on my wort or does it dissolve / sink and end up joining the trub?
 
What kind of kit? I'm always curious to see who is recommending secondaries these days.

The people that sell buckets and bottles that can be used for secondaries would be my guess. The same people that say you will be drinking world class beer in 10 days with their kits, and which have everything included except the 4# of table sugar.

Just a guess on my part, but I did get a solid C in my marketing class.
 
*n00b threadjack*

this is great, glad I opened this one...

Dude from LHBS told me to primary in Ale Pail with bottling spigot, then to secondary, then back to primary bottling Ale Pail to bottle. But I'm down with just leaving in Primary for 4 weeks or more, then bottling.

My Question: I had it worked out in my head (with all the racking) how to bottle it...but now, if I just leave it in primary, how do I bottle it? I know it's a dumb question, but the spigot will be covered in yeast cake I imagine.

Thanks fellas, this is all great.
Much appreciated, sorry for the thread hijack...but I have similar questions, thought I'd keep it all in one place.

meatwad
 
*n00b threadjack*

this is great, glad I opened this one...

Dude from LHBS told me to primary in Ale Pail with bottling spigot, then to secondary, then back to primary bottling Ale Pail to bottle. But I'm down with just leaving in Primary for 4 weeks or more, then bottling.

My Question: I had it worked out in my head (with all the racking) how to bottle it...but now, if I just leave it in primary, how do I bottle it? I know it's a dumb question, but the spigot will be covered in yeast cake I imagine.

Thanks fellas, this is all great.
Much appreciated, sorry for the thread hijack...but I have similar questions, thought I'd keep it all in one place.

meatwad

you can use your carboy, just a bit harder to stir priming sugar solution or get another bucket
 
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