TJB wrote:Again I have no idea, but I do know that I have indeed tried on occasion to buy one of the said instruments from SR, and failed miserably even when I qyuoted the part number direct from the website only to be told "Thats not a standard range . . . . .Can't give you a price guv"
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All I'm looking for is a sacchar/hydr ometer in the range 0.990 to 1.020 with a decent scale for finishing gravity. As long as you know the calibration temp then you can correct for measuring temp. Oh and the hydrometer shouldn't need a couple of pints to take the sample in.
A "Finishing Hydrometer" - I've not seen those before. Only the Americans could come up with it!
I would think that a narrow range hydrometer like that is somewhat over the top for home brewing, but I see your dilemma. If you need something similar to replace your broken one, then you could do the same thing by using two of
these from the Brannon M50 Range. or the equivalent
M50 series from Stevenson, but we are getting into precision here and cost.
Getting hold of them might be tough (drug-making laws and all that). Brannon do have a retail website but, needless to say, their hydrometers are not on it. It might be worth talking to Brannon though, but failing that your local school science department might be able to help.
It is also true that official, excise-style brewers' saccharometers are also over the top for home brewing, and, apart from them being ruddy expensive, the trial jar will hold as much as the average home brewer's brew-length. I have a set of these, but I wouldn't consider using them for home brewing because they are unnecessary and I would be gutted if I broke one, so they stay in their pretty wooden box.
On the other hand, I feel that the £2.99 jobs that are sold in home brew shops, although probably adequate for most purposes, are a bit "under the top" for the modern perfectionist home brewer. Perhaps they have improved since I last bought any, but if you dunked three of them into the same solution you would end up with three different results. I soon abandoned them in favour of ordinary, general purpose, laboratory types which, although three times the price, have an etched scale, rather than a piece of paper shoved in the tube, have a datum line for calibration and are accurate to BS718. The extra money is well spent in my veiw.
I bought mine from Gallenkamp, years ago, but that firm seems to have become a victim of the de-industrialisation of Britain. RS do a couple of types for around a tenner, which although not perfect, are probably good enough.
