GrowleyMonster
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2019
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Another vote of confidence for the Tilt. Absolute accuracy might be a couple of points off but comparative accuracy will be spot on the money. So it will tell you if your gravity has stayed exactly the same for the past three or four days or whatever, and you know your ferment is done and you can transfer to keg or bottle if you wish, or leave it in the fermenter to clarify a bit more, whatever. You don't have to open the fermenter. You don't have to take a sample from the spigot and suck air in through the airlock. You drop it in when you pitch yeast and it just stays in there until you rack out.
However, if I had known about the iSpindel when I started, I would have got one of them or a kit of parts for one. It is cheaper than the tilt and uses wifi instead of bluetooth. Longer range, and should be able to set it up as a network resource pretty easy. But anyway I strongly suggest getting one or the other. As a bonus, you get temperature, too. With a big beer, the beer can be over 10 degrees warmer than the ambient temp. My room temp was fine for my last bottled batch but I got a lot of heavy citrus in the unconditioned beer, and I suspect it is because the temp was, at 76 degrees, near the top of my yeast's working range. So knowing your temp is probably even more important than knowing your gravity. You can tell when it is done. No airlock bubbles, no micro bubbles floating up in the beer, (well, you need a clear fermenter to see them.) and all the cloudiness will clear up. Generally. But you don't know the temp way inside the fermenter. Just feeling the outside won't tell you anything much. Float a Tilt in there and you can always know what the temp is, what the gravity is within a couple of points, and if either has risen or fallen at all in x amount of time.
A nice thing about the digital hydrometers is that they self correct the gravity for temperature. And you can calibrate them in a known gravity solution. You know distilled water has a gravity of 1.000. You know if you calculate a solution at 1.100 that the reading should be 1.100. So you can adjust the calibration, or you can make a correction table, whichever. The truth of the matter is, a couple of points in OG doesn't really matter, and a couple of points in FG barely matters at all. You are looking for a stable reading that is no longer falling.
But if you just got to do it old school or cheap charlie style, the tube that most hydrometers ship in can be used for a sample tube and it uses way less beer than a regular sampling tube. You just have to fiddle with it, rock it slightly to keep the hydrometer unstuck from the tube wall. My suggestion is go with one of the floating digital type. The Ispindel is only about $55 or so, assembled and ready to use.
However, if I had known about the iSpindel when I started, I would have got one of them or a kit of parts for one. It is cheaper than the tilt and uses wifi instead of bluetooth. Longer range, and should be able to set it up as a network resource pretty easy. But anyway I strongly suggest getting one or the other. As a bonus, you get temperature, too. With a big beer, the beer can be over 10 degrees warmer than the ambient temp. My room temp was fine for my last bottled batch but I got a lot of heavy citrus in the unconditioned beer, and I suspect it is because the temp was, at 76 degrees, near the top of my yeast's working range. So knowing your temp is probably even more important than knowing your gravity. You can tell when it is done. No airlock bubbles, no micro bubbles floating up in the beer, (well, you need a clear fermenter to see them.) and all the cloudiness will clear up. Generally. But you don't know the temp way inside the fermenter. Just feeling the outside won't tell you anything much. Float a Tilt in there and you can always know what the temp is, what the gravity is within a couple of points, and if either has risen or fallen at all in x amount of time.
A nice thing about the digital hydrometers is that they self correct the gravity for temperature. And you can calibrate them in a known gravity solution. You know distilled water has a gravity of 1.000. You know if you calculate a solution at 1.100 that the reading should be 1.100. So you can adjust the calibration, or you can make a correction table, whichever. The truth of the matter is, a couple of points in OG doesn't really matter, and a couple of points in FG barely matters at all. You are looking for a stable reading that is no longer falling.
But if you just got to do it old school or cheap charlie style, the tube that most hydrometers ship in can be used for a sample tube and it uses way less beer than a regular sampling tube. You just have to fiddle with it, rock it slightly to keep the hydrometer unstuck from the tube wall. My suggestion is go with one of the floating digital type. The Ispindel is only about $55 or so, assembled and ready to use.
(i'm lucky i can get it in and out at all now...)
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