Oh, my gosh, I can't believe all this time I've been using
my refractometer wrong, I just I cannot believe it.
And what did you know about what?
What do you mean you knew it?
Well, you're using a refractometer and you hadn't done the wort
correction factor.
You got to do that with the hydrometer before you use it to measure.
Well, does that mean I mean, what what are you talking about?
Even I don't even understand what you mean.
Well, because they're made for fruit juice.
They're not made for wort from beer.
All right. Well, how come you didn't tell me this before?
I mean, well, you're one of them. Big Youtubers.
I figured you to know this stuff, or at least I don't know.
Well, clearly, you know so much.
So do you want to come teach this thing or what? I mean.
Now you go ahead and do your little tutorial.
I'm just going to sit over here and have a beer.
Well, at least I'm smart enough
not to drink out of my spit cup.
Really, all jokes aside,
the wort correction factor was something that I did not actually
it did not really know about at all
and until somebody made a comment on Facebook post that I made.
So, you know, once I found out about it, then it's like,
you know, I'm off to the races, diving into it, figuring it out .
What is it about? How does it work?
So I want to show you how to get your wort correction factor
for your refractometer.
Now, you are going to need a refractometer and you are going to need a hydrometer.
Now, I do like the Brewing America brand.
And the one that I like specifically is the one with the thermometer in it,
because it actually will tell you what the temperature is of your sample.
So then you can put that in the calculator,
which we're going to be talking about a little farther on down the road,
and then that will help you adjust the reading on your hydroometer.
So you get an accurate reading on it,
and then you can compare it to the reading on the refractometer.
So what you need to do is
you need to take a reading from your wort
and take a reading with your Hydrometer
and then take a reading with your refractorometer.
And you put it in a spreadsheet, which I'm going to show you here
in just a few minutes, and I'll have a link for everything down below.
This is like a 17 dollar refractometer.
And then I'll have a link down below for they Brewing America hydrometer as well.
So, you know, what you need to do is take your sample,
get your reading on your hydrometer,
and then take your reading on your refract ometer.
You put it in the spreadsheet. It gives you a correction factor.
Now, that is basically a real simple explanation of it.
And what I wanted to do is they say you should track over
about 30 different brews.
And that's what the spreadsheet this from Brewers Friend website has on it
is 30 different cells you can put information in.
But to do an initial calibration, if you don't have any wort handy,
what I have done is I actually took some DME and about 150
milliliters of water,
which will fill these up and leave
a little bit of sediment in the bottom, as I'll show you here in just a minute.
I did three samples, put three teaspoons in the first one,
three and a half teaspoons in the second one,
and four teaspoons in the fourth one of DME shake the heck out of them
and let them sit for about a half an hour or so.
And then what you want to do is, is your pour off the liquid
from those samples into your hydrometer and keep track of you know,
you'll track that as you go along.
And so let's just do that. I'll show you.
I've got three samples here that I shook up earlier,
and they're not a hundred percent clear, but that's not really a big issue at all.
Then I like to just fill it from the jar.
And then when the hydrometer starts to float,
you know, you've got enough in there.
So we'll do our first one here.
And let's see where we wind up. It looks like
1.040. So now one of the things, too, is a lot of the
the adjustment calculators are Brix.
Now, this particular
refractometer that I'm using measures Brix and specific gravity.
So that's the nice thing about that.
I don't have to do any kind of conversions if you have one that doesn't have.
Brix reading on it, I'll put a link for a
tool to be able to adjust specific gravity for this calibration.
So let's take a look at the reading here.
And so this reading is showing.
One point, 1.049 so I mean, you can see there's quite a bit
of a difference between the 1.040 and the 1.049 that this is reading.
So if I were checking this wort off of this, I would be getting a false reading.
So I'm going to put those numbers up on the screen over here.
And then as we go through this, I'll just leave them there.
And then when we go into the spreadsheet, I'll show you exactly.
You know, we'll keep those numbers here and we'll put those in
and I'll show you that code, that wort correction factor.
So let me get the rest of these all done up
and then we'll jump into the spreadsheet and we'll take a look and see what
that looks like.
OK, it's actually 1.058.
And this was 1.060.
One point zero six eight
one point zero for this, so this is off, so it's off quite a bit there.
All right, so that one is one point zero four two.
And this is showing one point zero five four.
So you got a pretty good disparity there.
All right. Now, one last thing I want to take a look at
is the thermometer on here.
And these readings are all 74 degrees.
So that was the last number that we actually needed was a 74 degrees.
And we've got all our numbers over here from the samples.
And so now let's go into the computer and I'll show you how to
input all that stuff.
And then we'll come up with that wort correction factor number.
So you know what to put it in your software.
So when you take a reading with your refractometer, it is accurate.
So let's jump in the computer.
Shhhh, Ya'll gotta do me a favor.
You got to hit the like button like he keeps going on and on about it.
Like why don't nobody like my videos.
I don't understand. So help me.
Hey, why is this camera,
why is this camera, what did you do, what did you do?
All right, real quickly, before we get started, the computer thing,
one of the things that I forgot to mention was calibrating your hydro monitor.
You want to calibrate your refracctometer when you get it, really before
you do any batch of beer.
And that is with a drop of distilled water.
And you just make sure that it zeroed out at the bottom.
One thing that they do mention in this spreadsheet,
and I'll have all the links to everything down below, is that they recommend
that you do samples of a large beer like a beer that's, you know,
one point zero eight three or twenty Brix to start out with,
which kind of makes sense because you're normally
measuring for juice, which, you know, wines are higher
that alcohol generally than most beers are.
So they recommend doing that.
I'm going to show you what I did and the results that I had.
So and one of the things that I forgot to do
when I was taking the measurements
was measure everything in Brix which is fine, because that is actually
like a happy accident.
A little Bob Ross there, happy accident, where I can actually go in and show you
the calculator or conversion tool that is on Brewer's Friend.
So there is a conversion tool here.
And basically what you do is
you can convert your specific gravity
back to Brix And so the first sample was one point zero four nine,
and that puts puts us at twelve point one Brix.
So let's go ahead and put that in the spreadsheet.
And that was twelve point one Brix
And then our hydrometer was one point zero four zero.
And then you'll see it gives you the factor over here, the adjustment factor.
Let's do the next one.
So the next one was the refractometer was one point zero six eight.
So let's see what that is in
Brix All right. One point zero six eight.
And that is sixteen point six bricks.
So let's hop back over in a spreadsheet and put that in sixteen point six bricks.
And the hydrometer reading with one point zero five eight.
So the next one was one point zero
five four for the refractometer.
So that was thirteen point
three Brix So we'll put that one in.
And the hydrographer sample was one point zero four or five.
I did recheck the hydrometer sample in the last one,
and it was actually higher than what I originally said in the video there.
I just found out that, you know, I spun it again
and there was a little bit of particles that were hanging on it and stuff.
So I was able to measure it again.
And it was one point zero four or five.
So this will tell you
your factor is one point one eight seven two, which is kind of high.
I mean, I'm not surprised by a really cheap
refractometer you can spend more money on and probably get
a little bit more accurate. One.
One I'd like I said, the one I bought was seventeen dollars.
So one of the things you can do with that is whenever you have that figure,
you can actually put it like in your software.
So the correction factor that we had on that was one point one eight seven two.
So we'll put that over here, one point one eight seven two.
And then if we put our bricks from,
let's say, the first one, which was twelve point one, that should actually
give us our corrected factor, which is one point zero for one.
So that is what the actual reading was on that.
And that is worth using.
Actually, we're not calibrating the refractomter.
but so by using the brix scale, you can check and see how accurate your
refractometer is and put that number in your software
so that you can make sure you get the correct reading.
Now, this is just really like a high level overview of it.
If you want to if you want to do more, you can do like they did here
where you have that high.
The high DME was like 1.082 was the hydrometer sample.
And then they went through and did like four or five different ones.
I'll leave it up to you.
They definitely recommend doing like multiple batches.
And I would suggest, you know, making this part of your routine
for probably 10, 15, 20 batches, something like that.
And then you can start to dial in that war correction factor even more.
But what I'm giving you here is a good starting place.
If this video was helpful to you. Thumbs up, as always. Appreciated.
You can click on the video right here for more information on this type of thing
or the video down here.
This has been, Brian, for Short Circuited Brewers, we'll see you on the next video.