Tilt Hydrometer - Who Uses Them?

[Gigantorus]

Last year I bought one of the Tilt Hydrometers in the belief that it will help me gain a better understanding of my brews. In the beginning it seemed to match my recipe specs. But of late I've had all manner of weird outputs.

I've spoken to Marcus Owens, the creator of the device, about some of these unexpected outputs and have some clarified.

The one that no one could explain if the over-the-top figures I got when I used a vile of the Clarity Ferm in a Hazy IPA brew. Things like an expected final ABV figure was 6.5% but I got 8.27% (Apparent Attenuation of 112.50% - MJ's New World Strong Ale Yeast generally maxes out at 82%), or FG reading that was to be 1.015 but read-out was 0.990.

So I ask those who use a Tilt Hydrometer here what their experience has been with this device so far thanks?

Cheers,

Pete

 

[jackmarshall77]

Have not used it much yet. It’s a pain in my stainless fermentor but all good in plastic. A bit disappointed that it does not log to internal memory and download a full data set when you connect. Instead you only get a single data point when your phone is on and the app is open. So it’s good for checking but hopeless for creating a histogram. It’s a shame as it would have been trivial to include enough memory to store a full history on board and sync the lot when your phone connected providing a full history graph.

 

[gusterminator]

I use a Tilt! It worked awesome for me. I found that using TiltPi on a raspberrypi worked the best. I also found that it's best to start logging after your done moving the fermented around....once it settles or sits for an hour or so then name your beer and start logging to google cloud. My Tilt seemed off at the very start but soon settled in and my O.G was bang on with my refractometer reading. I was brewing an IPA with white labs high pressure yeast. It is awesome to have a graphical representation of the fermentation using the chart. I turned off the sleep function on my samsung tablet and left it on the TiltPi web page so I had constant monitoring of the fermentation.

 

[N3MIS15]

I have 3. I only use them to let me know when fermentation is complete. They are far from accurate in my experience, but do well enough to show a curve if logging through something like Tiltpi. I use stainless fermenters making logging hit or miss. I have been using homemade ESP32 repeaters which seems to have helped to increase the logging potential.