pdilley
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Try this web page, the calculator layout may work for you better:
http://brew.stderr.net/refractometer.html
At the top enter 140 in the gravity and when you tab or click out of the box it will tell you your Brix should be reading close to 32.2 on your refractometer at a temperature of 20 degrees C.
Now this is the only time where Measured Gravity and Brix will agree with each other on a simple straight conversion.
From now on as more alcohol from fermentation enters your liquid it will bend more and more the light the refractometer measures to get its reading. At the beginning with a little bit of alcohol Brix and Gravity are close to each other in value when doing a simple conversion between the two. At the end of fermentation with a lot more alcohol the difference is bigger between the two values.
So we use a second calculator that takes care of the skew. Critical is the original gravity or original brix reading to get original gravity because the calculator needs to know how far down from the value we are currently to determine how much skew needs to be applied to make the end answer accurate.
So on that page down below put in 140 in the Starting Gravity area and as you monitor a ferment with refractometer to not waste your mead on constant hydrometer sampling you put your current Brix reading in. You read 20.6.
Put 20.6 into Brix
As soon as you tab or click out of the box it should tell you that your gravity reading should be close to 1.051 and that the estimated alcohol percentage is 11.9% alcohol in solution.
Volumetic dilution is easy as well if you can't get that last 2% by alcohol conversion you can reduce the gravity in solution with water dilution which is fine as long as it's not a large amount because it will dilute everything across the board: Alcohol, residual sugar, aroma, flavour. Small amounts are unnoticeable and large amounts are noticeable.
If you have exactly 25 liters of 1.050 liquid then water which is 1.000 gravity liquid will be added. If you add 1 litre of water you have 26 liters in the end of total liquid.
So Liquid litres multiplied by Liquid gravity
add to this Water litres multiplied by Water gravity
then divide by the final Combined litres amount.
That's your new gravity amount.
Keep playing with litres of water to dial in a gravity you want to achieve.
You are looking for about 18.5 or so Brix reading in an optimum perfect world with your yeast you used. Or a gravity around 1.036 to 1.038 or so. See if you can find out how much water dilutes to a gravity of 1.040, 1.048 and 1.036 as an excercise. As a further excercise you can find out say with 100mL sample size. Then, as a final excercise you can pull off samples and dilute to each gravity level and taste tem and see if you can tell any difference between both them and the undiluted original liquid.
Cheers,
Brewer Pete
http://brew.stderr.net/refractometer.html
At the top enter 140 in the gravity and when you tab or click out of the box it will tell you your Brix should be reading close to 32.2 on your refractometer at a temperature of 20 degrees C.
Now this is the only time where Measured Gravity and Brix will agree with each other on a simple straight conversion.
From now on as more alcohol from fermentation enters your liquid it will bend more and more the light the refractometer measures to get its reading. At the beginning with a little bit of alcohol Brix and Gravity are close to each other in value when doing a simple conversion between the two. At the end of fermentation with a lot more alcohol the difference is bigger between the two values.
So we use a second calculator that takes care of the skew. Critical is the original gravity or original brix reading to get original gravity because the calculator needs to know how far down from the value we are currently to determine how much skew needs to be applied to make the end answer accurate.
So on that page down below put in 140 in the Starting Gravity area and as you monitor a ferment with refractometer to not waste your mead on constant hydrometer sampling you put your current Brix reading in. You read 20.6.
Put 20.6 into Brix
As soon as you tab or click out of the box it should tell you that your gravity reading should be close to 1.051 and that the estimated alcohol percentage is 11.9% alcohol in solution.
Volumetic dilution is easy as well if you can't get that last 2% by alcohol conversion you can reduce the gravity in solution with water dilution which is fine as long as it's not a large amount because it will dilute everything across the board: Alcohol, residual sugar, aroma, flavour. Small amounts are unnoticeable and large amounts are noticeable.
If you have exactly 25 liters of 1.050 liquid then water which is 1.000 gravity liquid will be added. If you add 1 litre of water you have 26 liters in the end of total liquid.
So Liquid litres multiplied by Liquid gravity
add to this Water litres multiplied by Water gravity
then divide by the final Combined litres amount.
That's your new gravity amount.
Keep playing with litres of water to dial in a gravity you want to achieve.
You are looking for about 18.5 or so Brix reading in an optimum perfect world with your yeast you used. Or a gravity around 1.036 to 1.038 or so. See if you can find out how much water dilutes to a gravity of 1.040, 1.048 and 1.036 as an excercise. As a further excercise you can find out say with 100mL sample size. Then, as a final excercise you can pull off samples and dilute to each gravity level and taste tem and see if you can tell any difference between both them and the undiluted original liquid.
Cheers,
Brewer Pete
. Seems like you can get them in any manner of ranges and variables...
