DIY Photometer for EBC measurement

[WishboneBrewery]

Love it! People like you make the world a greater place.

"Greater" = Geek / Nerd / Techie

[andybiochem]

Right the software is available HERE.

Let me know if you manage to get any use out of it! In fact post some photos...showing how wildly inaccurate it is!!

Brew day today, so I'll post a shot of it in action once the wort is ready.

[Birdman]

Brilliant!!

I'm meant to be a scientist for a living, but you seem to have done more actual science in a few days than I have in the last few years...

[andybiochem]

Brilliant!!

I'm meant to be a scientist for a living, but you seem to have done more actual science in a few days than I have in the last few years...

Haha! Don't worry, I'm a professional scientist too!

[andybiochem]

Here is the reading of yesterday's brew.

It was a particularly dark stout, BeerSmith said it would end up as 106.4 EBC.




Now, because it is such a dark beer and as we've seen the ability of the software to distinguish darker beers is quite poor (evident from the standard curve), I decided to dilute the target beer to bring it into a useful colour range. Apparently it is standard approach to dilute dark beers before colour measurment.


Here's a screen shot:


Note that I used the original uneditied photo from my iPhone (it came out quite over-exposed), and I added labels in PS afterwards just for clarity.

Looking at the curve produced from the standards, the best looking curve is the "red channel only" so I used that for estimation. Sure enough, the dark end (70 - 100 % on the x axis), is almost flat. This means the software will not pick up any differences in colour for dilutions between 70 - 100 % (i.e. 35 - 50 EBC). It doesn't really recover until below 50% too, so I opted to use the 20% dilution of my target beer for measurement. It came out as 21.9 EBC.

Multiplying 20% back up to 100% gives (21.9 x 5) = 109.5 EBC for this stout, not far off the prediction of 106.4.

This was a measurement of the sweet wort before fermentation, so I'd assume things might be different once fermented and fined (I know, I know, no need to fine stouts, but I do anyway ).

Promising first steps perhaps?

Cheers!

[simple one]

Just found this thread. Very interesting, and thank for sharing your findings. Good work!

[kivsaras]

what kind of software you used to measure...may u send me the link...wanna use for school project

[Haydnexport]

Holy thread resurrection Batman !