Tilt Wireless Hydrometer and Thermometer for Brewing

I really dislike taking beer samples and trying to measure specific gravities to monitor fermentation and temperature accurately. Then i stumbled on this little beauty. I couldn't wait to try it and I have used it in every brew since. Such accuracy and control was unknown to me prior to this. I recommend these now to all home brewers. If you know exactly when a brew has finished fermenting, the beer can be transferred immediately. Getting this right can save your whole batch from sitting too long and getting infected. I love my TILTs. They are so clever.

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.

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, etc I 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.

I really wanted to like the Tilt because it would be very convenient to be able to monitor the gravities on my lagers to know exactly when to start the diacetyl rest. I pitched a cider this weekend and decided that this was my chance to test the thing out! Pretty much only disappointment. 1) Accuracy and calibration. I put the thing into a jar of RO filtered water to calibrate it, and the thing would bounce around from .0098 to 1.004. I would calibrate it, and it would go to 1.000, then start bouncing around again. This bodes ill. Temperature was also off, so I calibrated that too? But then it started acting funny. 2) Performance in fermenter. I dropped it into my carboy of cider, and it estimated the gravity at 1.083... The actual gravity measured by traditional hydrometer and calibrated for temperature was 1.053. I calibrated the thing again to match the actual gravity and temperature of the cider as measured with a very accurate instant read and took it downstairs. 3) Fermentation. The next day I saw a head of foam building up and bubbling in the airlock, so I pulled up the Tilt app to take a look! Tilt said the gravity had INCREASED to 1.054. I checked it again yesterday evening (this is day 2 now) and it said the gravity was 1.054 and the temperature was 44 degrees F - what the hell? It was 72 degrees in the room, to say nothing of any warmth generated by fermentation. At this point, I just deleted all of my calibrations because it seemed like what the tilt was sensing was closer to accurate, but that just makes things even MORE confusing! App (Android). The app is pretty primitive. There are settings for taking a log of your data and for sending it to the cloud or saving it locally, but it seems very unintuitive? Like, I have no idea where any logs are, and there is no button to just go and look at them, which seems like a no brainer. As I said, you can re-calibrate the thing for gravity and temperature, but when you do that, it still shows the original value the tilt thinks it's reading in addition to the calculated one, and that is also confusing. The functionality is pretty simplistic. Last but not least, today is day 3, and as I was getting ready to head out the door for work this morning, I thought I would pull up the app and see what it says now. And suddenly, I can't even connect to the thing. Is it off now? Did the battery die? I don't know. I will try again when I get home from work today, but there is no way to pull the thing out of my fermenting cider safely so if it isn't working, I guess I maybe got two days of incorrect data that is stored somewhere mysterious. Bottom line, I can't imagine trusting this thing to give me accurate information without double checking with a traditional hydrometer, and if that's the case, then what's the point of buying this? I can't believe the price given my experience with the functionality so far and the primitive nature of the app. I am granting a second star to account for any user error that is my fault (like I am sure if I tried harder I might be able to find where the log is stored). After the cider finishes I am going to return it, absolutely not useful.