Many of us, I’m sure, use 6.5-gallon buckets for fermentation. The Brewmaster ones, I would assume, are very much like every other 6.5-gallon bucket. I got to wondering if the volume levels printed on them are accurate. Surprise! They’re not. I filled my bucket with one measured gallon at a time-- all the way to five gallons-- while marking-off each gallon with a Sharpie pen. Sharpie ink can be wiped-off quite easily on the HDPE plastic of the buckets, so I decided to make a photographic record of the measurements of the levels from the outside-bottom of the bucket.
For those of you who use these buckets, the dimensions shown are from the bottom & outside rim of the bucket. Look at how poorly-marked are the volumes printed on at the factory. They look to be about a half-inch low. Now that you have these empirical measurements, you can mark your own buckets for accuracy.
It’s scandalous, ain’t it, to pay for something that’s wrong from the very get-go?
I measure volume by weight. If you know the weight and the specific gravity you can easily calculate volume. There is a tool in Beersmith that makes it super easy.
I know only two things about beer. 1) Water weighs 8.3507 pounds per gallon. 2) Liquid malt is 1.25X the weight of dry malt. I’m a trucker for 31 years, so I don’t know too much about anything of any genuine value…
Buckets aren’t the only brewing vessels that have inaccurate factory markings. Before relying on any vessel, be sure to verify the markings. You’d be surprised at how far off some are.
Several weeks ago I picked up two “three-pound” barbells during a fitness class at the local Y and realized they were not the same weight. It bugged me throughout the whole workout!
The first thing I do with new equipment is calibrate it. I have several wooden sticks and spoons for kettles and whatnot marked for actual measurements. Amazingly, my Mash & Boil AIO calibrated right on the money with its internal volume markings - but its thermostat is off, as my handy Thermapen always reminds me. That said - I use five-gallon food-safe buckets for fermenting, and I don’t worry about measurements (which they don’t have anyway). Whatever goes into the bucket is whatever goes into the bucket. Whatever comes out of the bucket will be less than that, but seems to consistently be just the right amount to fill my 2.5 and 3 gallon kegs (which I have not calibrated! ).
I can dig that you’ve got a system that works for you, with as inaccurate as a noob like me might believe it to be. If your system works for you, then to helsinki with what anybody else might believe. I am one who is quite keen on accuracy. I have done mechanical drawing for years, played golf for decades, driven a Class 8 truck for thirty years (with ten of it on paper logs), have been reloading my own ammo for decades, have designed two wildcat rifle cartridges and built the rifles for them, one of which was a 1000-yard target rifle. My dad was a civil engineer and taught me as a kid to always try to do the best, sharpest and most complete job I could. I guess that is from where I get the trait for being one who would ask "Is that one in a million? Or is it one in one million and two?" My brother is the same way, and he has been a civil engineer for thirty-two years. He does a great deal of contract administration so accuracy in what is said, written and paid-for is paramount…
So - to be clear - although I’m a super basic, non-competing brewer, up until the moment the chilled wort goes into the fermenter, I am a stickler for precision. Weights and measures, measures and weights. The grain bill, water bill, hops, and even sanitizer are all measured to a fare-thee-well, using weights where possible and volume measurements where not. I use brewing software for calculations and everything that happens, exceptional or otherwise, is recorded into a brew sheet for that day’s brew. I use a mise en place with hops and other additions measured out in labeled prep bowls. I take hydrometer readings repeatedly through the process (cooled to the correct temp), and I work hard to hit the boil-off I’m shooting for on the projected boil schedule. I have a small dedicated fermentation fridge I use with a temp regulator, and I double-check temps now and then with another thermometer. Etc.
But I don’t measure the amount of cooled wort that goes from the boil kettle into the fermenter. I can’t tell you why exactly, other than it wouldn’t affect anything that happens next. I guess you could argue that measuring wort into the fermenter would be useful triangulation in the event that I made an error in my boil-off, but I’m so obsessive about measuring and recording before and during during the boil (with careful attention to the relationship of the volume of liquid to the meniscus for my target measurement) that I feel that’s unlikely. Still, perhaps it’s the difference between “one in a million” vs. “one in a million and two.”
I haven’t used my wooden spoon/stick “calibration tools” (with markings for each gallon – and of course a different spoon or stick for each kettle) since I moved to an AIO that has surprisingly accurate markings by the 1/4-gallon, but for volume measurements of water (and also for boil-off), they worked quite well.
I’m not sure what the analogy here would be, but I’m a pretty good baker/cook who can make things like Swiss buttercream, macarons, and marshmallows, and who prides herself on quality and repeatability with cakes and other baked goods, and I attribute that skill partly to my commitment to cooking by weight with a scale and by temperature with thermometers. But I don’t weigh the final product. I do weigh dough if I suspect I had a process error and left something out, and a couple of times I’ve tossed out the dough and started over because I could tell from the weight that something was missing even if I couldn’t figure out what it was. But that’s close to the beginning of the process, not the end. I could weigh the final products… but I don’t.
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