Tilt Bluetooth Hydrometer Detailed Review

[cheesebach]

Has anyone used a tilt in a pressurized fermentation system? Would the carbonation throw off the accuracy?

I've been wondering the same thing. I just got my Tilt for this past Father's Day, so I haven't been able to test it yet. However, on the Tilt FAQ they indicate that the Tilt works great in pressurized fermentations. I'm guessing that in a sealed fermenter where the headspace pressure and CO2 in solution are in equilibrium, the readings will still be accurate. If no one else has any experience to share on this, I'll be sure to report back in a few weeks with data from a pressurized fermentation!

 

[mcomb]

Yeah I pressurize ferment with my tilt. I generally only do 4 or 5 PSI but the readings have seemed perfectly normal at that level.

 

[Aaron Beers]

Do you have to have something (e.g. iphone running tilt app) within bluetooth range all the time in order to catch the readings? Or does the Tilt store the readings and then you can sync up your iphone to it whenever you want? E.g. I drop the tilt into the fermentor at 10AM and then I come back with my iphone at 6PM, will I be able to see all the sample readings from 10AM through 6PM even though my phone hasn't been within bluetooth range of the tilt that whole time?

 

[Dory Rules]

My main concern would be towards the end when ramping up pressure to start carbonating. Would carbonation affect the readings like it does with a standard hydrometer?

 

[cheesebach]

My main concern would be towards the end when ramping up pressure to start carbonating. Would carbonation affect the readings like it does with a standard hydrometer?

From what I’ve been able to find on the topic, it sounds like the gravity readings for carbonated beer are primarily affected due to the CO2 degassing when taken out of a pressurized environment and measured in ambient conditions. Since a closed, pressurized fermenter stays in equilibrium the readings shouldn’t be affected. If you then release the pressure (or quickly add it using CO2 from a tank), readings will probably be affected for some time until things stabilize again.

 

[Dory Rules]

Cool!

 

[micraftbeer]

Do you have to have something (e.g. iphone running tilt app) within bluetooth range all the time in order to catch the readings? Or does the Tilt store the readings and then you can sync up your iphone to it whenever you want? E.g. I drop the tilt into the fermentor at 10AM and then I come back with my iphone at 6PM, will I be able to see all the sample readings from 10AM through 6PM even though my phone hasn't been within bluetooth range of the tilt that whole time?

It doesn't store the readings anywhere. Every 15 minutes, it will take the current reading and push it out to the cloud. If your bluetooth device isn't connected at that point in time, no reading. At first I would have large gaps of time while I was at work with no data, and then lengths of time throughout the evening and overnight where I'd get data. In general, that was fine, because you could still visualize the trend even with the gaps. But I wanted a complete plot so I bought a used iPhone 4s for $25 off eBay and then just leave it plugged in downstairs (forced to not sleep) and I have full data plots now.

 

[mabrungard]

My experience is that taking 2 gravity readings a day is more than sufficient to assess and evaluate the beer's progress.

 

[eric19312]

My experience is that taking 2 gravity readings a day is more than sufficient to assess and evaluate the beer's progress.

Not sure what you mean. Two hydrometer samples a day prob fine on commercial system but on homebrew scale would be a killer. Two refractometer samples a day ok if you know the right conversion formula for your current recipe. Two tilt measurements a day would be useless given the noisy signal...I seem to need lots of measurements to smooth things out.

 

[cabron99]

Subbed

 

[georgeburgin]

I have five of these little babies... At first it wasn’t cool to see how my wines fermented over a timeline and the internal temp of the fermenter. These days I’m just using them to check OG and FG. They’ve helped me monitor a failing fermentation before it goes fully stuck. Very helpful and no loss due to traditional hydrometer readings.

 

[day_trippr]

I can count on 1 finger the number of post-pitch gravity checks I've done in 2018...

Cheers!

 

[glugglug]

I bought one. Used it on lager in a fermenter that had a blowoff tube. There wasn’t any activity in the blowoff, and my starter had acted different than usual. It was a yeast I don’t use often. Because of no activity in the blowoff, I started to panic. Then the gravity posting from the tilt started to drop consistently. I figure I had a leaky gasket on that batch. The tilt was very useful. Beer came out great. I love the tilt. I use a raspberry pi to post readings to the web. I plan on getting another. I sometimes have 2 batches going at same time.

 

[Morrey]

I've been wondering the same thing. I just got my Tilt for this past Father's Day, so I haven't been able to test it yet. However, on the Tilt FAQ they indicate that the Tilt works great in pressurized fermentations. I'm guessing that in a sealed fermenter where the headspace pressure and CO2 in solution are in equilibrium, the readings will still be accurate. If no one else has any experience to share on this, I'll be sure to report back in a few weeks with data from a pressurized fermentation!

I use Tilts in my Uni Tanks. I close off the blow off tube (valve) with a few gravity points remaining so the beer will slowly carbonate before crashing and racking to keg. Carbing the beer and pressurizing the tank has shown no ill effects or erroneous readings by the Tilt.

 

[Morrey]

@glugglug : Back a couple of years ago when I used plastic pails with lids, I encountered an almost identical scenario in which I had no blow off activity. I almost did a second yeast pitch but readings showed a drop in gravity, so I let it ride out.

The beer was fine but I had a gasket leak in the lid's seal. I bought a floating Tilt hydrometer and never found myself in a position to second guess the fermentation process again. These hydrometers show trends that are valuable to monitor...all w/o having to open the fermenter or waste wort for samples.

 

[Aaron Beers]

Just ordered a Tilt. Aside from getting a better picture of how fermentation is progressing, I'm also interested in seeing how helpful it is for estimating the change to SG caused by ingredient additions during fermentation.

I have a base beer fermenting now and I'll be racking it onto a bunch of cherries in a couple days. It would be interesting to see how the SG readings change. I'm wondering if I'll be able to get a reasonable idea of how much sugar was contributed by the addition, and hence get a better idea of the final ABV

 

[user 40839]

I'm eyeing one. Which is ridiculous, since I barely brew. But ******* I love the bling...

 

[Ban Yan]

I'm not a Raspberry Pi user or familiar with that at all, but there is a page on Tilt's website talking about their Raspberry Pi download: https://tilthydrometer.com/products/tilt-pi-raspberry-pi-disk-image-download

Actually, I have an unpolished setup that logs my green tilt to a SQLite database and shows charts of temperature and sg on Node Red. Unpolished because it really should have ways to log and chart any tilt hydrometer you have, but I only got the configuration as far as I need it for what I was doing... But if anyone wants it, I can probably paste the relevant stuff somewhere.

Subbed

 

[user 40839]

Doesn't Fermentrack have built in support for the Tilt through it's BrewPi implementation? The way I'll likely go, although I'm still sketched about using BrewPis with SS Brewtech's glycol cooling.

 

[Dory Rules]

How tough is it to change the battery? What is the lifespan of the battery?

 

[mabrungard]

Its easy to change the battery as long as you wear rubber gloves to improve your grip. I only got 2 brews out of the first battery, but those were lagers and the fermentation time was probably 2 weeks each. So maybe a month of actual use? The unit does shut off when you sit it up vertically on a shelf.

 

[marjen]

Anyone else have issue with the tilt when they add dry hops? Mine works great until dry hops are added then its all over the place pretty much the rest of the time.

 

[Nagorg]

If you add them commando, that makes sense. Especially whole leaf. I bag mine for dry hop'ing so I dont think it would affect it. Still pondering pulling the trigger on one.

 

[micraftbeer]

For me, it thought my gravity bumped up by 4 points when dry hops added. I tossed in 2 oz. of pellets, so as they puffed up and collected at the surface, they messed with the bouyancy and tilt of the Tilt. But I threw in the dry hops once the gravity trend told me fermentation was done anyway, so at that point, I wasn't really tracking gravity.

 

[postalbunny]

I got one of these a while back and liked it enough to buy a 2nd for when i'm doing two carboys at once. Subsequently with the release of the newer model I got another to compare. The newer model appears to have a more accurate temp sensor. Though, i don't seem to be more than a degree off either way. Right now I have an older one reading 66 compared to 67.3 one-wire sensor and the new one at 69 compared to 68.5 one-wire sensor.

The gravity readings are close around 1.010-1.050 and off quite a bit around 1.100 without calibration. But the gravity changes/deltas are not. If you don't bother with calibration and toss this thing in you will see a similar curve to the SG as it ferments and can know when the brew has stopped when the FG doesn't change for 24 hours. That said, it's not hard to drop it in water and record "0" then drop it in your fermenter and record the SG you got with your hydrometer. No need to do a multi-point calibration unless you have nothing better to do.

You can log to google sheets with a cheap android phone or enable the bluetooth on your RPi or any other dev board. I wrote a tool to poll every 5 mins and upload to influxDB so i can generate reports and use grafana for alerts/monitoring. It's nice to have history and alarming capabilities.

To answer a question on carbonation -> during fermentation the tilt will bob quite a bit and unless you enable some smoothing you'll see jagged lines in data collection. This doesn't bother me, and i suspect you'll see the same thing during carbonation if you have degassing... but during carb you're usually putting gas into solution and i doubt that will affect it's density or change the tilt's "angle". I suspect your readings in a spunding situation would be fine.

To answer if the beer is better, i can think of a few ways the tilt helps your beer quality:
1) my lagers are better and have quicker turn around... i can use the fast lager method more reliably now. I ferment 50-55degF until > 70% of attenuation then ramp to 75degF. With the tilt I can know when i'm approaching that 70% attenuation without taking daily hydrometer samples which will waste wort.
2) If you did not have one-wire sensors and you live in the south with 85degF water you can chill to 85 and put the fermenter in the freezer/chamber then set an alarm to wake you when the temp hits your pitching temp.
3) I can be certain that the beer is "done" fermenting when the SG hasn't changed in a 24 hour period. Before you would have to pull a sample and depending on your setup this may introduce o2 exposure worst case, and best case your out the beer used to make take the sample.
4) you can also now dry hop at intervals ... you can know when your 25% complete, 50% complete etc. NEIPA often try to dose a couple times during active fermentation... and i prefer to always dry hop during active fermentation to void o2 exposure issues in hopes that the active yeast will chew any o2 up that gets tossed in with the hops.

Here's a snapshot of two 6gal fermenters chewing away on a Russian Imperial Stout:

https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/fi7HGtXVqSW41BYwpIPSXuuljPuAQ3XJ

 

[Northern_Brewer]

On that last point, you can also start diacetyl rests based on gravity - Cloudwater have started their diacetyl rests earlier and earlier over the years, from memory they now start the ramp on their DIPAs at something daft like 1.050 or 1.045

 

[Sparger]

As a home brewer and wine maker, I can't see spending this type of $ for this item. I always re-hydrate my wine yeasts (go ferm, etc.) and have never had a problem. Wines don't suffer by leaving them alone. With my beers (including lagers), I use a temp controlled chamber with temp probes that get me to within 1/10 of a degree F. I use stir plated starters with yeast counts based on the OG of the beer, and inject 02 with a stone. Never had an infection, never a stalled yeast. I have spigots on all of my fermenters so taking a sample for SG reading is easy (after I pick up the fermenter). I've got three different scaled floating hydrometers so I never have to squint at super tiny lines of a one-does-it-all hydrometer. I like them more than the blurry blue line of my refractometer, that just sits in the box. For dry hopping 02 concerns, I've got CO2 on a spare bottle that I squirt on top after readings/hopping.
Now if this item were $25, I'd probably buy two, just to not have to pick up the fermenter out of the chest freezer chamber. The fun I'd get doesn't justify this price.

 

[augiedoggy]

Its easy to change the battery as long as you wear rubber gloves to improve your grip. I only got 2 brews out of the first battery, but those were lagers and the fermentation time was probably 2 weeks each. So maybe a month of actual use? The unit does shut off when you sit it up vertically on a shelf.

ebay does carry the correct 3v rechargable batteries and chargers even though tilts site still says the rechargables are all 3.7v..

 

[augiedoggy]

As a home brewer and wine maker, I can't see spending this type of $ for this item. I always re-hydrate my wine yeasts (go ferm, etc.) and have never had a problem. Wines don't suffer by leaving them alone. With my beers (including lagers), I use a temp controlled chamber with temp probes that get me to within 1/10 of a degree F. I use stir plated starters with yeast counts based on the OG of the beer, and inject 02 with a stone. Never had an infection, never a stalled yeast. I have spigots on all of my fermenters so taking a sample for SG reading is easy (after I pick up the fermenter). I've got three different scaled floating hydrometers so I never have to squint at super tiny lines of a one-does-it-all hydrometer. I like them more than the blurry blue line of my refractometer, that just sits in the box. For dry hopping 02 concerns, I've got CO2 on a spare bottle that I squirt on top after readings/hopping.
Now if this item were $25, I'd probably buy two, just to not have to pick up the fermenter out of the chest freezer chamber. The fun I'd get doesn't justify this price.

This is really a practical argument that can be transferred to anything in hobbies... Does a person really need those $1,000 golf clubs or $300 golf bag? how about a $200 sports jersey or a home brewing rig that rivals a polished french stainless capachino machine? Probably not but its just one of those things that makes the hobby more fun for those people.. and it really depends on how much spare change a person has.

I intend on purchasing some when brucontrol 1,1 is release just to have the added functionality of having them control my fermentation schedule.. To me thats a huge step forward for $135 bucks.

 

[beernutz]

A heads-up for anyone considering buying a Tilt on ebay through lionbrewingsolutions. I ordered mine on 8/8/2018 and on 8/9 I get an email from them saying the Tilt had been shipped. Awesome. However, when it hadn't arrived in a week I checked the USPS tracking number to find that only a shipping label had been created but USPS had not been given the package yet.

I emailed lionbrewingsolutions and they confirmed that they have completed the Paypal transaction but don't have green Tilt's in stock. Their ebay ad says they have 8 available of some unspecified color so I emailed them back asking for one of the ones they do have on hand but no reply yet. They gave me no indication of when they would have them either.

lionbrewingsolutions is going to get a negative ebay review regardless but I may also cancel the order and dispute the Paypal transaction if they don't reply quickly that one is on the way with a legit tracking number.

I should have checked their negative reviews before buying as there were a couple of Tilt purchasers in July who reported the same experience I've had.

UPDATE: The seller has replied that they will send one of the ones on hand and hopefully that is true. When you make the ebay purchase you leave a message for the seller on which color you want so it might be a good idea to ask them what they have on hand so you don't end up in my situation. Or just buy direct from Tilt as you are only paying $7 more there for shipping than from the ebay seller.