Taking gravity readings when fermenting in Demijohns

[Pope]

Right then,

I've managed to acquire three 5 litre Demijohns from a colleague, which I plan to use for my brews...because I'm going to be doing small batch All Grain brews from now on.

However, as the thread title suggests...how do people take readings of their brews when they're in DJ's? Up to now I've used FV's for fermenting, which have taps on the bottoms, so it's been simple to take gravity readings.

 

[Cqr]

Wine thief

 

[DoctorMick]

I used a sanitised turkey baster, only works a couple of times tho then there isn't enough left in the DJ!

 

[Leon103]

Drop the hydro meter in the DJ?

 

[Pope]

Wine thief

I wasn't sure if this was an accusation or a tool...thankfully I found out that it's the latter

 

[Cqr]

I just poor the sample back in the demijohn
But I starsan probably

 

[chewie]

You do get shorter hydrometers which won't bottom out in a DJ.

 

[ericmark]

I use an anti-freeze hydrometer which has never been used with anti-freeze as a pipette to draw the liquid and put in a vase to float the hydrometer in. I had thought I could use it directly to measure, but I have now found out why beer hydrometers are not in a tube like anti-freeze and battery acid types. It is the bubbles, to read a beer hydrometer you need to spin it to get rid of the bubbles, you can't do that with a hydrometer in a tube. So removed the actual hydrometer from the anti-freeze tester very cheap from Lidi, and just use the tube and bulb to draw liquid as with any pipette.