Exactly what I do. Screwy loves company.
well then… after correction from more knowledgable folks I don’t like my beer any colder than 280 K
Thanks Sean. That’s what I was wondering about — Plato being the generally “non-American” standard measurement for Gravity. I didn’t think that you’d mix G.U.'s with Metric measurements, so that makes sense.
How closely does Plato and Brix run? Is there a formula for conversion from Brix to Plato, or are they pretty much the same?
They’re the same out to the second or third decimal place, so for brewing purposes you can just treat them as identical.
If you’re encountering °Brix because of a refractometer, though, there are corrections that need to be made. They have to do with the properties of wort, rather than the actual measurement units. Refractometer Estimates of Final Gravity « SeanTerrill.com
So °Brix from a refractometer is really a misnomer, at least not truly °Brix without dividing the reading by 1.04? /shrug All this time I had been hearing from others and assuming that the refractometer was a Brix reading. Score one more for the online information correction team.
A couple questions about both of those massive formulas — pardon my lack of scientific understanding; I’m a web designer and developer, not a scientist.
I see notations of RIi1, RIi2, RIi3 and the same pattern for RIf. I understand that RI is the refractive index and that i and f are initial and final respectively. But what is the numeric value in that? I didn’t quite follow if you were taking three RI readings at the beginning and end, or if that meant something else.
The other item I didn’t quite follow in your larger formula is where it says 0.0216*LN. What does LN correlate to? I didn’t see any indication as to what that stood for.
Your formula is very impressive, and I can’t imagine how long it take to come up with that. Your nerdery is certainly exponentially higher than I could hope to attain. Cheers to you, my friend!
With thieving out fermenting wort to take measurements and losing volume as a big concern for a number of home brewers, you’d think that someone would have come up with a hydrometer that required less volume for measurement by now.
Not exactly. A degree Brix (or Plato) is equivalent to 1% of the solution (by weight) being sucrose. So if you have 1 kg of a 15°Bx sucrose solution, you have 150 g of sucrose and 850 g of water.
A refractometer doesn’t measure the density of the solution, though. It measures the refractive index. Since the RI changes with changing sucrose concentration, you can calibrate a refractometer such that it will give a reading in °Bx instead of RI, saving you some time and effort in converting. Which is all well and good if you’re making wine, since the sugars in grape must are almost entirely sucrose.
Beer wort is a mixture of a dozen or so sugars, and sucrose isn’t even the most common (maltose is). So to use a refractometer to measure the density of wort, you have to use a different conversion from RI to density.
The superscript is simply the exponential notation. x2 is “x to the second power”, x3 is “x to the third power”, etc.
“ln” is the natural logarithm, a logarithm with e as the base. (e is a non-rational number equal to about 2.718.) Natural logarithm - Wikipedia
Truly, the ridiculously lengthy formula is just there for comic effect. If you actually want to convert refractometer readings either download the spreadsheet or use the online calculator.
The easiest way to add fun to your brewday is to do calculations in hexadecimal 
Funny.
my last brew clocked in at 01 2a. I expected better but I only got 3f percent efficiency. Ahh well it’s only 0a gallons and it’s still good.
I’ll play. 1.042, 63% efficiency, 10 gal?
100% correct.
nerdery over. geekdom takes over. :o