We have developed a device that will measure specific gravity and temperature in-situ, and transmit the data wirelessly to provide brew batch trends from these measurements. We call it the “BeerBug”:
One of our founders is an avid hobbyist and noticed that the craft brewers tend to only have one cost effective specific gravity option in the old-fashioned hydrometer. It has been a significant (but fun) development to be able to measure s.g. precisely using non-hydrometer means.
We are still learning the marketplace and would enjoy your comments on this type of device as it relates to the craft brewers amongst us. For example, would you want to have a specific gravity and alcohol content trend throughout a batch without having to take hydrometer readings? Is datalogging sufficient near the brew, or would you also want to expand it to your mobile device and/or iPAD? We’re thinking this may be valuable to home brewers, but are also looking into usefulness at microbrewer sites.
Pay no attention to him. He’s old school. For those of us with pumps and PID controllers and control panels (Oh My!) Its the next best thing. How does it work in a carboy from inside a freezer? Or yet a SS conical in a freezer? Does the metal shield the signal? Check your SG with your iPhone while taking a crap in the morning.
Its an interesting idea. If you’re like me and don’t really take very many gravity readings it would give you a much better idea of when the batch is done. I typically am very short on time at home so by the time I finally get around to checking in on my batches they are done but you never know, I might make time to check if I had geeky toy.
It really would come down to cost. If the cost is fairly low, quite a few geeks would pick one (or 5) up. If it is expensive than it becomes one of those things like a conical. It might be nice but those pesky kids seem to think they need food and school supplies, like every month!
The guys who are trying to build the completely automated brewery will demand you release an API with it so they can program it into the cyborg-brewer they are making.
All in all it could be a nice addition to the brewery.
Great, this is the type of info we are excited to have! Appreciate all of your comments.
Carboy in a freezer is one scenario we hadn’t thought of. BUT the device would work in this type of environment and be able to get its signal outside the freezer for viewing/trending/etc…the biggest question is with the stainless conical. Everyone we’ve heard from thus far uses plastic pails or carboys. If there is a sight hole or non-stainless membrane/opening/valve anywhere on the conical, we would be in good shape. If not, there would be an extra development step - very doable, just not there yet. We’ll check into the available SS conicals and do some testing to see what’s required there.
API to tie into an existing system is also a good comment - we can provide a serial interface for the “cyborg-brewer” setup who’s beyond using a local datalogger+display or mobile device. This is a definite feature set option for the micro-brewers, but we hadn’t considered it for the home brewers…
As for cost, we are targeting $179 for the in-situ sensor plus the receiver/display/datalogger. If someone wanted more than one, they wouldn’t need multiple receivers, they’d just need multiple sensor units.
Thanks again - we now have some more relevant info to chew on!
i could check my crap with my iphone and send that out electronically…
i actually think that would be an interesting tool more so the temperature part than the sg. i actually only check my fermentation sg when i think it is done and then a few days after to confirm. (plus i like to taste it) i may switch to a refractometer and that would eleminate the taste.
if this could just upload in to brewsmith the temps and sgs that could be interesting.
I think it’s a really neat idea and it would be a cool gadget to have. Temperature monitoring would be nice and it would be nice to know how close my lagers are to terminal gravity without taking samples.
But it might be a long time before I’d get around to paying $180+ for one. There’s a lot of other equipment I would buy first for that kind of money.
I like the potential. I too have a stainless conical and there are ports in the lid that could allow an antenna or maybe allow some signal to escape the Faraday cage that the vessel represents. Considering this is a modestly costly device, you would have to consider that the brewer that is interested in this unit is likely to have this sort of vessel. And almost any brewer strives for a temperature controlled fermenting environment, so a chest freezer or refrigerator is almost a given.
I’m also curious how the unit is sterilized and if there is any need for it to stand up or be oriented in the vessel? A conical obviously does not have a flat bottom. I’d be interested in understanding how it is obtaining the gravity readings.
just like the name suggests, there is a little bug in there with a mic and transmitter. It takes a little sample. tastes it and says ‘Too Sweet!’ into the mic. similarly for temp readings it sticks a little thermo out the tiny window and says into the mic ‘Do you believe this heat?’ ;D
I’d purchase something like this, but would like to see a more inexpensive option. Create a lesser version that does nothing but report temperature and gravity only when I request it. No fancy graphs or fancy graphics. Sell it for around $50 - $70 and I think you’d be selling a bunch of them. Get a deal worked out with one of the bigger online homebrew stores to include them in the starter equipment kits they sell.
The device’s form is similar to that of the glass hydrometer and it floats within the vessel as a buoy. The s.g. sensing mechanism is the innovation above and beyond the other features (i.e., wireless, temperature, buoy geometry, etc.) and accounts for the majority of the assembly cost. Temperature is the “easy” part - and this of course is reported as the fluid temperature rather than jacket temperature (although they may not significantly vary, especially if the vessel itself is inside a controlled chamber).
Great comments on pricing and the target user – as you probably can surmise, these are big questions for us. We could do a “temp only” wirelessly for $50, but the SG measurement device for initial introduction will still be ~$179 as there is some complexity to it. If the prevailing desire is to eschew datalogging/trending, we could remove some functionality on the receiver/display end to create a “budget line SG” model.
A port in the lid of the conical SS fermenter does wonders for getting the wireless signal out - we’re surveying to see if there are any configurations that don’t have such a feature. Question is whether the slopes on the conical vessels are steep to the point where the buoy might touch the bottom surface if it floats near the perimeter…we’ll be doing some focused testing here.
The housing is made of food grade plastic, so the sterilization is fairly straightforward. Still has to be done, no “auto-clean” feature yet…
Sincerely appreciate all of your thoughts & ideas ;D
So if you were doing temp only it would be $50 with a receiver, but temp and SG is $179? So additional sensors would be something more than $100?
At that price point you might get more interest from the pros, I don’t need to know that badly. Now if each one was $20 and the receiver could be any bluetooth enabled device with the right app (I don’t really know the technology), I could see buying a bunch of them. I tend to have a lot of things going at once, and rarely take any readings.
I love the idea, and have been looking at the HOBO data loggers for temperature already. Of course, they have nothing for specific gravity. As you point out, this is the innovation.
Help me understand what you mean when you talk about the “receiver/display/datalogger.” I understood the sensor to have a bluetooth radio that transmits its logged gravity and temperature wirelessly. If that is the case, why not use “any bluetooth enabled device with the right app” as the “receiver/display/datalogger.” As you described, it sounds like there is another (expensive) box that sits in between.
I’d pay you $70 for the sensor and another $10 for the iOS/Android app.
(1) the CO2 bubble impact was a very nontrivial part of the design. So far this looks like it’s been addressed very well.
(2) the receiver vs. direct bluetooth from the sensor is a good point. Our first version has the BeerBug sensor “buoy” with an onboard infrared radio. The receiver box resides outside the vessel, but still in the vicinity. It reads from the infrared sensor, displays and stores the data, and (optionally) provides a bluetooth link to a mobile device. So bluetooth comes from the “box” rather than the sensor. I’'m not sure how to attach pictures here, so instead here’s a link to the picture of the BeerBug (left) with the receiver display (right): http://tinyurl.com/cf6tk4a.
As was mentioned, we could put bluetooth right on the BeerBug and skip the receiver box altogether. So the cost for a standalone BeerBug SG sensor would go up slightly because of the bluetooth module addition, but the need for the receiver/display would be eliminated and the overall product cost would be lower by $30-$35 or so. The reason we haven’t decided to do this for original product is because we’re still collecting info on the home brewers’ interest/willingness in using a mobile device (or other bluetooth-enabled device such as a PC) to collect data.
The expectation was that everyone could use the local receiver/display and a subset would want to incorporate using their mobile device. The local receiver/display provides the ability to do both, but yes it does cost more to have two separate modules instead of one integrated module. If there’s strong interest in reading directly from your mobile device (Android/iPhone/iPAD), we could do a spin on an integrated BeerBug without the local receiver/display.
Can’t say this often enough, thank you for the great info!
It’s of course pricey for many homebrewers but I’m certain there are some that would love it. I’d be more in the market if it connected to a smartphone/laptop over bluetooth (or similar).
I’ve seen graphs at craft breweries indicating that they are taking daily gravity readings. I’m not sure they’d want a floating version though (They’d have to find it after every batch). Perhaps a version mounted to the fermentor wall, it could also be hardwired (no battery replacement). It would need to be food grade and be able to endure clean-in-place chemicals.
I think I would do it so that it had bluetooth on board and could be read from any device, but then you also sell a device which can just sit in place and rebroadcast to a website where you could check from anywhere. I think that is the limiting factor, not everyone will pay to monitor from work, but I would prefer to be able to read it from my existing handheld rather than have yet another device to keep track of.
Either way though, at $140+ per device, I’m not going to be buying any. That’s a lot of malt!
