Tilt Wireless Hydrometer And Thermometer (Orange)

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 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.

I’ve only now used my tilt for my first fermentation since purchase.It works as advertised, but I had thought the app would not only show the current readings, but also would graph it for you. Apparently it will save all data points to a .csv file that you can import to a spreadsheet like Numbers or Excel, etcI believe you can also set up with a raspberry pi u it to send values to a google docs spreadsheet app for visualization too..,I’ll look into that.The only VERY REAL problem I see with the unit that I had read about and fully expected, was the very limited range of the Bluetooth unit in a stainless steel conical fermenter.I am using it in a Spike 10gallon SS conical…and with my iPhone 12 max pro..,I have to hold my phone inches from the top of the conical and wait a few seconds to acquire signal and get a reading.I have an older iPhone 6 s Plus I plan to put a new battery into and in the future keep that on top of the fermenter to try for a constant reading …Anyway, I like the unit and plan to buy a few more. I keep several 1-3 gallons fermenters of mead and cider going at any given time…and sometimes, a 5 gal glass carboy of beer going..,You just have to make sure all your Tilt units are different colors…the app can’t work with multiple units of same color.This is an early review, but so far I’m impressed and a happy customer.

this is well worth the money for anyone and everyone making wine. No more opening your fermenting bucket or carboy, removing a sample and testing for specific gravity. Just download the Tilt App, start your wine, drop in the hydrometer, and take readings when you need to. I now own 2 of these and will never go back to the old method of measuring s.g.

When I first saw the item listing & description, I was intrigued by the idea of just opening an app on my phone to see how the beer is doing. It reduces the potential for contamination, I spend less on cleaning & sanitizing, and it takes the guesswork out of wondering when the beer is done in the primary.Well, almost. Ends up the hydrometer only communicates with the phone app when the app is open, and, honestly, the app is meh at best.I ended up purchasing a Raspberry Pi Zero and installed TiltPi (free image developed by the Tilt Hydrometer team), set up cloud logging. That setup allows for continuous monitoring. I can open the TiltPi site on my mobile browser and see real-time the temp and SG. I can then click on the log link and see a Google Sheet with data being logged every few minutes along with nice charts showing the performance over time. For a data geek, it's perfect.So, the Tilt Hydrometer does what it says, and does it alright out of the box. But if you want to get 24/7 monitoring and logging, I recommend getting the Raspberry Pi Zero/TiltPi to go with it.