Does anyone else have the same problem with these that I do? It takes soooooooooo long to get a reading and generally doesn’t float that well. I honestly am not sure I’ve ever gotten a good reading off of one yet (I have two because I thought my first one was broken). Am I just not doing it right? I always understood thermometers to be pretty straight forward…
Do yourself a favor and get a digital thermometer! The floating ones are crap, and break way too easily! After breaking two in one brew day, I switched.
I use this one from our host. It seems to work well. It’s $18, which is 3x the floating ones, but I would go through 3-4 floating thermo’s per year.
http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/km14 ... meter.htmlI have the same issue but rigged something up to fix it. I took a spare piece of copper tubing I had from making my work chiller and lay it across the top of my brew kettle. then I strung a zip tie through the eyelet on the floating thermometer. I have it so that it hovers about an inch or two off the bottom of the brew kettle when it is hung on the piece of copper. I am able to just leave it in the brew kettle as I am steeping my grains (I have only brewed extract w/ steeped grains) and get a pretty good reading the entire time. I can adjust my flame/heat as needed. I did this for the first time on Saturday and it worked quite well.
My very first beer kit came with a floating thermometer. A giant beast of a thing as I remember that seemed to take forever to get a reading. It broke. I threw away the beer for fear of glass shards, bought a new kit and a digital thermometer. Never looked back.
A basic, digital, instant read thermometer just isn’t very costly and you can easily find them in almost any grocery store, kitchen store or hardware store.
I have a digital because, like you esteemed gentlemen, it just makes sense. Glad to hear I’m not alone, though. The fear was rising that I simply wasn’t smart enough to operate a thermometer.
