My refractometer came today and I tried it out with some sugar water...success, the scale went up to 3.4!!!!! What is the scale calibrated in????? It goes up to 18, my guess is that it is the Brix scale. My next concern is, how do I convert that to specific gravity????Any help would be greatly appreciated. And Mesa, if you could post that spreadsheet with the water+alcohol calculations in it that would be great. Thanks,
Ed
Refractometer question
Moderator: slothrob
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dartedplus
- Strong Ale
- Posts: 339
- Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2001 11:33 pm
- Location: Hummelstown, PA, US
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Mesa Maltworks
- Strong Ale
- Posts: 477
- Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2001 11:16 pm
- Location: Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island
Refractometers are in
The scale you are seeing is "Brix" and under a certain specific gravity and lacking alcohol in solution with sugars will approximate that of Plato scales. The one you have has a Plato/Brix range from 0 (SG 1.000) to 18 ( SG 1.064) which is a short range, but at these gravities, your unit will always share a very close correlation with Plato scales.
Most refractometers used for brewing have the winemaking range, 0 to 32 Brix ( 32 Brix approximates somewhat closely to SG 1.128, but getting into and at this area actually needs corrected to correspond to real Plato, but this is too technical a topic to be relevant here and may be rarely needed anyway).
The only drawback to the one you were sent is that you cannot measure worts above 1.064.
If you didn't get the directions with this one, remember that you have to calibrate it with distilled water to 1.000 prior to each use. If your model is not ATC (automatically temperature compensated) it has to be calibrated at the same temperature as the wort you will be measuring. Both should be 75 degrees or below for the most accurate results.
As far as the equations: I will post them as soon as I can, I need to deconstruct my Access template to re-derive them as I haven't used them manually for a couple of years and therefore don't have the pure formulas for manual use easily accessable. Another issue is that the equations have exponential functions in them that may not display correctly when I post them to the forum, so I may need to e-mail them to you upon request as attachments in the MS Word format so they can be properly represented.
Most refractometers used for brewing have the winemaking range, 0 to 32 Brix ( 32 Brix approximates somewhat closely to SG 1.128, but getting into and at this area actually needs corrected to correspond to real Plato, but this is too technical a topic to be relevant here and may be rarely needed anyway).
The only drawback to the one you were sent is that you cannot measure worts above 1.064.
If you didn't get the directions with this one, remember that you have to calibrate it with distilled water to 1.000 prior to each use. If your model is not ATC (automatically temperature compensated) it has to be calibrated at the same temperature as the wort you will be measuring. Both should be 75 degrees or below for the most accurate results.
As far as the equations: I will post them as soon as I can, I need to deconstruct my Access template to re-derive them as I haven't used them manually for a couple of years and therefore don't have the pure formulas for manual use easily accessable. Another issue is that the equations have exponential functions in them that may not display correctly when I post them to the forum, so I may need to e-mail them to you upon request as attachments in the MS Word format so they can be properly represented.
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dartedplus
- Strong Ale
- Posts: 339
- Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2001 11:33 pm
- Location: Hummelstown, PA, US
My email
When you can, my email address is edthedart@netscape.net. I didnt realize that this only had a scale that went up to 1.064, but most beers are within that range. Except for the barley wine I plan on making in a couple of weeks. I'll just have to use the old hydrometer for that one. Thanks in advance for the info,
Ed
Ed