RAPT Gravity Velocity for Better Brewing Fermentation Automation

[@jello1977]

Love the PIL, however the RAPT website interface is clunky and not very intuitive.

[@KegLand]

We are continuing to do a lot of updates on the platform. If you have any specific requests please add them here: gitlab.com/rapt.io/public/-/boards

[@barwell]

Very nice upgrade. Great job by the RAPT Team - I love the continual improvement. Thanks.

[@KegLand]

Thanks for that. We really appreciate the support.

[@BitterRealityBrewing]

This is excellent and really needed in homebrewing as it can help to automate a ton while taking a lot of guesswork out of brews that homebrewers might be brewing over and over.

[@KegLand]

Thanks for that. Really appreciate it!

[@Seabass08]

It is the RAPT platform that convinced me to purchase Kegland products. This latest update is FANTASTIC.....Kee, hopefully you can post a Lager profile on the cloud so I can try and compare. I literally just completed a lager profile using my Pill & RAPT temperature controller..... back to drawing board using GV... LOL. Kegland ROCKS.

[@KegLand]

Thanks. We really appreciate it. We will keep bringing more features to the platform. I will do a video on the new profile management process too as this has also been upgraded substantially too.

[@redleader7503]

Late to the video, but great to see this added to the Profile options. Exactly the thing I questioned Kegland on when I bought my temp controller to pair with my Pill a year ago. Why is the most useful parameter not able to be used as a trigger? Well now it can. Good idea to make the first profile step not be dependant on a GV step. It's conceivable that if you have a first step say where temp changes when GV is below 15pts/day for example, it might be triggered at the start if you have a slow fermentation start as the yeast wakes up. Obviously the GV over a brew will rise to a peak then fall. The GV could well be low at the start as well as the end. Unless the GV value is being reported as a positive or negative value? IE rate of rising change or falling change?

[@wade3166]

Thank you for all the hard work, you guys are really giving us some powerful tools to help us improve our hobby.

[@KegLand]

Thanks for that Wade. We really appreciate it!

[@wade3166]

One thing I would love to see in a future update applies more to the Rapt cloud software. I would like the ability to name a specific fermentation, that I can later refer to. I usually do this in Brewfather where I can go back to old batches and refer to the fermentation start date, bottling date etc... but sometimes I am just using the Rapt cloud environment and would like the be able to refer back to a batch name instead of just a date range. Perhaps one other wish list item would be ability to compare 2 different batches side by side to compare the ferment, this would be cool to do a thorough evaluation of different yeasts, or changes in temp etc.. Love what you guys are doing, hope this is something that is feasible.

[@KegLand]

Thanks for that. We are in the process of a major upgrade in that respect so I think you will be happy once this feature is made live on the RAPT portal.

[@feuer-gluat-quoim]

This is a very cool feature with a huge benefit. I will test this with the next bach. I needed to change the settings of my account to standard gravity. With Plato units configured, the steps of your profile show -600.

[@KegLand]

Great. Look forward to hearing how you go. I really hope you guys get a lot of use out of this feature. I have been using the GV triggers for quite a while now and I am really convinced it's the way to go but we are keen to get customer feedback too make sure we are going in the right direction.

[@stripeyjoe]

Great addition. I was already doing something similar with a gravity related step, when the beer gets to 1.020 then it raises the temp by 2°C over two days.

[@KegLand]

Yes this can work fine but I really think that the GV number is much more reliable.

[@davewilliamson9022]

Great, a good addition to the use of the pill, still having a bit of trouble with yeast sticking to the pill to get a useful gravity reading other than when the reading stopped changing and has finished fermentation.

[@KegLand]

Yes the new GV feature basically eliminates that being an issue so hopefully you find this useful.

[@mickholgate3347]

Fantastic stuff Kee! How would you adapt this profile for non hazy pale ale for example? ie could this be used for other ale yeasts?

[@KegLand]

Remove the dry hop step. If you want to make clear beer then you are probably better off just adding hops at high krausen. To be honest other than that I would not change much. Depending on the yeast strain I would mainly look at changing the first aerobic fermentation step so you may go down as low as 15C for a really clean ale and for some very clean strains like Lutra you might change this to 22C for the first step.

[@qevinflynn]

This is really a great feature. Is gravity velocity calculated on the device and also available if BLE is used?

[@KegLand]

Yes it's calculated on the pill itself. It works great when BLE is used. In fact it's really the best way to use it as when you are in BLE mode you can also use the pill as the temp sensor too.

[@AngaryGranny]

Very interesting

[@KegLand]

Thanks for that Granny!

[@bnb.brewers]

We need something to retrofit icemaster glycol chiller with rapt ecosystem 🙏🙏🙏

[@KegLand]

We have a new glycol chiller we are working on so I think we making some good progress on this front.

[@bnb.brewers]

@KegLand great news ! I hope I could upgrade mine without buying an entire new one 😅

[@Moronicsmurf]

You can retrofit it by running the pump off a seperate power supply and drive that thru the tmpl ctl, letting the chiller just keep the tank temperature and you cycle it when needed.

[@RenatoTodorov]

@@KegLand please give us a way to retrofit that into the current glycol chiller, it would be a bummer not to be able to do so even if we need to buy an extra internal component.

[@adrianreed5464]

Could just do with a rapt BT spunding valve now!

[@Moronicsmurf]

Main issue with this is that the pill gets stuck in the krausen and gives incorrect readings - but otherwise its a neat feature. :)

[@SeanEidge]

Agree. I have had mine be off by 8 points from hydrometer reading already when it was dropped into the wort, no krausen, no yeast. And when krausen forms, it's anyone's guess what the SG is.

[@KegLand]

@@SeanEidge GV basically eliminates this from being an issue. If you get stuff stuck on the pill body like hops that will effect the absolute SG reading. With that said this will not be an issue with the GV reading as it looks at the slope of the graph rather than the absolute reading. This is one of the main benefits of using GV.

[@andrewlambert9946]

Help, I tried this and it did not work - imported profile from the cloud. It failed to move off step 2 - the first gravity step

[@KegLand]

That probably means you have not updated the firmware on the pill. Can you please let me know your Pill MAC address and/or send me the pill firmware you are running? Also are you using another RAPT device to control temperature? Which device are you using?

[@andrewlambert9946]

@@KegLand I am using the rapt temperature controller, This did an update when it powered on. The pill - good question, that might not have. pill mac address: 78-e3-6d-3c-f0-cc, temp control mac address - 94-e6-86-e1-94-38. Strangely, it did auto move from GV4 to Check gravity step. I had to manually move from GV2 and GV3

[@KieranShort]

I feel like it's time for the RAPT relay 😂

[@KegLand]

Yes this is in the pipeline. I would agree this is something that a lot of customers with a Pill but no other RAPT stuff would appreciate.

[@stevecoppins6554]

But in the real world the pill is only a very rough guide to gravity. Yeast builds up on the top of the pill during fermentation and is often 10 degrees out on what the true gravity is.

[@fuzzdood]

This true, but I would argue it doesn’t matter if it used to measure rate of change of SG as is talked about in this video.

[@MrMattHendry]

It's still better than periodic Specific Gravity sampling even from a digital density meter like a Anton Paar Easy Dens as it gives the brewer an indicator of the fermentation profile in realtime .

[@Zumaray]

⁠@@fuzzdoodyeah. IMO this is the whole point in why you would use velocity

[@KegLand]

Thats absolutely correct. This is why the gravity velocity is so important. Even if you get something like some yeast or hops stick to the pill the GV figure will still be a reliable figure to use as errors from hops and yeast are averaged out over many hundreds of readings. Also because we are looking at the slope rather than an absolute gravity it's also eliminates any error caused by crud sticking to the pill surface.

[@KegLand]

@@Zumaray Yes that is absolutely correct.

[@RenatoTodorov]

Am I the only one who struggles with the RAPT app and it's authentication? I'm logged out every 15 minutes or so and it's super slow to log in again. Feels like whoever implemented the authentication layer didn't care for implementing the refresh token logic.

[@DrunkPlanetcraftbeer]

At least you are getting a logout. I have had the temperature controller and the pill for over a year and haven't been able to get it to work. What a waste of money and time. I have sent so many emails to Kegland and they keep saying that it is my home Wi-Fi that doesn't work. 😂 I have the top-notch latest hubs and mesh. Everything else works just fine, including my Brewtools gear, except for the Kegland Rapt system.😢 Now, I'm stuck with something that I have never used and never will. 😒

[@KegLand]

@@DrunkPlanetcraftbeer Can you send me your MAC address. I have a feeling that you may have not register the devices correctly. For instance incorrect email when you first put that into the system or the registration process may not have been completed correctly. If you un-register the products and/or do a factory reset then you can normally resolve this pretty quickly just by registering the product again.

[@DrunkPlanetcraftbeer]

@KegLand I couldn't pass the first step, which is connecting the devices to WiFi. "Connection failed" every time, and I can not move forward to register the devices. I've tried on my previous house, on the new one, friends house and nothing. Please advise 🙏