Tilt Black

I absolutely love this hydrometer/thermometer. It's already helped me get the right water addition post boil to my homebrew and I love that I can throw it in a fermenter and just check it from my phone on their app. It's slick, and there are a lot of 3rd party softwares that can plot your fermentation over time and help integrate it into your brewing recipes. They're also starting to work with professional brewers and have some cool toys offered on their site if you want to really get into larger scale brewing.I have one complaint about this thing: it can be a pain to set up logging. It uses a bluetooth LE signal while floating to send the temp/sg and it sends it every couple milliseconds which will quickly drain the battery. The bluetooth LE signal can be picked up by your phone or another device, like a raspberry pi, set up near the Tilt. You can set up logging through the phone app or a pi using a google doc (csv) which will log every 15 min. (This seems practical: if it logged every time the signal was sent you'd end up with a wicked large csv file pretty fast.) There are instructions on the tilt website for how to do this, and while it takes some time it's pretty straightforward. However, the way the google doc connection is set up is fairly unsecured.I ended up using a spam gmail account to set up logging so if it got hacked I wouldn't lose anything important or personal. Also, if you don't have a pi, your phone will need to be near the Tilt in order to pass that signal to the google doc. However, there's an active community of homebrewing-programmers that are working on some better open source tools for this device. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, check out linjmeyer/tilt-pitch on github. I haven't used it yet but I looked through the code and it looks really promising.All that being said, it's still a great device that I'm going to be using for the foreseeable future.

I love the way this thing tells you how your brew is doing. I began by linking it via Bluetooth to my phone to get it to the wifi and fill out a spreadsheet (created by Tilt for each brew). I get temperature and specific gravity readings every 15 minutes. After determining that it worked with my phone, I got a Raspberry Pi and downloaded the image from Tilt. Again, it was super easy to set up, and it's been working great for a month over three wine brews. Tilt has good information on how to set it up and use it. It is easily calibrated and accurate once calibrated. The only time I've seen mine become inaccurate is when the yeast aggressively devours the sugar (the first day or so). All the activity tends to make the tilt less accurate, but after that initial period, it does just fine. For me, this was well worth the money.

This has saved me so much time and effort regarding the homebrewing process. Unit will broadcast the temp and density reading even from inside a stainless steel fermenter. No need to open lids for readings. You have to be within a few feet of the Tilt to get the reading though.MAKE SURE YOU TIGHTEN THE CAP FULLY.A loose cap will cause your circuit board to short, also make sure you remove the battery after each use and wash the capsule, cap, rubber grommet after each use and leave the Tilt out until capsule and cap are 100% dry. I have made about 25 batches since I purchased this and it has worked flawlessly.

I think most users purchase the Tilt for brewing beer, but it is a great tool for making wine. I use it in primary fermentation right up until the first racking into a carboy. It makes recording the wine type, specific gravity, alcohol content, and temperature as easy as a Google doc. I have four of these and find them to be a wine making must have now. If you make just one batch of wine at a time, then using the phone app will suffice for connectivity with your tilt. If you are making multiple batches at once and will run multiple tilts at once, it make a lot of sense to get yourself a Tilt Pi. The hardware is inexpensive and the software is free. The Tilt Pi allows for continuous recording of each batch up to a Google doc. It provides you with a step by step view of how each batch is progressing and gives you plenty of insight on temperature and specific gravity all the way through. I would never go back to hand measuring SG now that I have used the Tilt and I strongly recommend it.

This is my 3rd Tilt device as I really appreciate monitoring wine and beer temps and SGs continuously. I’ve used other options in the past which required a floater on a string through the airlock, but these were problematic maintaining a good air seal, but I like that those devices supported WiFi logging so I didn’t need to trigger readings.These devices are easy to setup (just drop in through the opening of most fermenters), easy to use (just open the app, name your brew and reading take place automatically), and the software works well with a nicely designed Google spreadsheet which not only shows all readings but also graphs them and calculates ABV. This is great and I’m happy enough with this product that I’ve purchased 3 of them!That being said, I’m really missing the WiFi support of my old solution. It’s a hassle to remember to open up the app and stand close enough to the fermenters to get a reading (when mine are in the basement I can usually get a reading from the upper floor if standing directly above it), but that manual process leads to irregular samples and gaps in the data, and when you’re not there, you’ve not getting any data at all so you end up with big gaps whenever you travel and can’t see if something going wrong when you’re away.Tilt’s website indicates they offer a solution for this: Free software you can install on a Raspberry Pi device (something you purchase separately and configure yourself - not something they currently sell as a solution). I’ll probably give this a shot soon but wish they had an off the shelf solution for WiFi.