What do people use to take constant gravity readings of your fermintation?

Brewer #271297

New Member
Trial Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2019
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I have seen a few of you that have hundreds of gravity and temp readings during fermentation. What do you guys use? Any recommendations. I've always done the manual method each time there is a step in brewing and fermentation. And would love to automate that.

Thanks in advance.
 
I've never taken continuous SG readings, and I've been brewing since the late 80's. That said, those who do either seem to float a hydrometer in their beer (which I can't imagine working well due to krausen) or toss in a 'Tilt' hydrometer (which is likely in my opinion to be similarly corrupted in its readings via krausen). The tilt monitors both gravity and temperature.
 
I use tilt. A raspi w-zero as the server. It will display current conditions live on your phone from anywhere and it uploads stats to brewfather every 15 minutes.

I wouldn't use it to replace a real hydrometer, but it's pretty darn close.

Whole setup is about $175 for both pieces
 
I've never taken continuous SG readings, and I've been brewing since the late 80's. That said, those who do either seem to float a hydrometer in their beer (which I can't imagine working well due to krausen) or toss in a 'Tilt' hydrometer (which is likely in my opinion to be similarly corrupted in its readings via krausen). The tilt monitors both gravity and temperature.
You might be surprised. It doesn't effect it allot. The tilt is 90% submerged so surface foam doesn't do much
 
What does someone who has never owned (and does not intend to own) a smart phone do if they decide they want a Tilt? My laptop has Bluetooth. Would that work?
 
What does someone who has never owned (and does not intend to own) a smart phone do if they decide they want a Tilt? My laptop has Bluetooth. Would that work?
Kinda. You would have to use an emulator to use the phone app on your laptop or (better) get the tiltpi on a raspi board which has a websever biult in to it.

If you have a apple or Android tablet. Those work too
 
Kinda. You would have to use an emulator to use the phone app on your laptop or (better) get the tiltpi on a raspi board which has a websever biult in to it.

If you have a apple or Android tablet. Those work too

No tablets, but I do have a new Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard (with essentially an embedded Raspberry Pi 4 computer within, plus with the benefit of a higher CPU clock speed than the Raspberry Pi 4) running as a low demand desktop computer, and using the Raspberry Pi OS operating system (formerly known as Raspbian). It has both WiFi and Bluetooth.
 
Last edited:
No tablets, but I do have a new Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard (with embedded Pi computer within) running as a low demand desktop computer, and using the Raspberry Pi OS operating system (formerly known as Raspbian). It has both WiFi and Bluetooth.
would have to look and see if that would work. The "tilt pi" app is bootable so it might not let it run that and be a pc. But the w-zero is literally $20
 
The Pi can talk to the Pi zero

I use tilt. A raspi w-zero as the server. It will display current conditions live on your phone from anywhere and it uploads stats to
Same here. Data us uploaded to many places, the default is Google sheets, but this site (brewersfriend) also can take in the data.

The tilt is not entirely accurate as far as absolute specific gravity measurement is concerned, because it is affected by some outside factors such as CO2 bubbles, and krausen remains. But to display the general trend of your fermentation it is perfectly fine. The temperature sensor is unaffected by those factors and is very accurate. You can also recalibrate it if you like.
 
My Pi keyboard has the standard 40 pin GPIO. Would that be the way to link it to the Pi Zero?
 
My Pi keyboard has the standard 40 pin GPIO. Would that be the way to link it to the Pi Zero?
No, it would be a stand alone board. You access it via its biult in web server with a browser
 
For the Tilt, you can also use an old Amazon Kindle Fire or other tablet, providing the device has both functioning Bluetooth and WiFi. You can pick them up cheap or free if you know someone who upgrades frequently.

As far as the Tilt accuracy goes, there are a couple of quirks. Early in the fermentation, CO2 bubbles form and stick to the Tilt, showing a temporarily higher reading. They eventually turn loose. As you can see from my cider batch below, there was an initial rise in the reading..

Screenshot_20210413-180215.png
 
Last edited:
I'm not really a gravity gadget kind of guy, but it is interesting to follow this thread.
 
I use the Tilt with the Arduino and a refractometer. Not anal enough to worry about exact sg with a hydrometer.
The Tilt sends info here to Brewers Friend and I can keep an eye on whats going on from anywhere.
 
My Pi keyboard has the standard 40 pin GPIO. Would that be the way to link it to the Pi Zero?
The Pi zero talks WiFi, so use your LAN to speak to it, it has its own IP address ( like http://192.168.1.10:1880/ui). I assume you have a wireless router. Once configured, the Zero will use WiFi to send data to the internet and bluetooth to listen to the Tilt.

The tilt web site has some good information on how this all works.
 
I use an old iPhone with the Tilt 2 app and it sends to Brewer’s Friend just fine. And I am one of the least tech-knowledgeable people around and I found it easy to set up- so I know anyone can do it.
 

Back
Top