Plaato Airlock

$129, plaato.io

One of the biggest advantages professional brewers have over homebrewers is access to data that helps them achieve consistent results, over and over again. Every batch is a learning process, and breweries measure and log progress during fermentation to gauge factors such as yeast health, temperature impact, and more. But it’s one thing to pull daily samples when you’ve got a 15 bbl fermentor full of beer, and another when your vessel is filled with 5 gallons.

The Plaato Airlock offers a clever and noninvasive approach to remotely monitoring and storing your fermentation data, so you can track data like the pros. Given the fermentation activity, it allows you to make decisions regarding temperature settings, hops schedules, transfer timing, and more without the risk of pulling a sample from your fermentor and exposing your beer to oxygen or reducing the net volume of your small batch.

We found the device itself to be easy to assemble, set up, and start brewing with, requiring only a Wifi connection and power to easily sync with the mobile app. From there, enter your batch size and starting gravity and you’re off. The device monitors and graphs estimated gravity, ambient temperature, and alcohol level.

The data can also be pushed to some of your favorite brewing apps (Grainfather, Brewfather, Brewer’s Friend, and more) to track batch-bybatch variations in your brew. The accuracy of the device was relatively close (within .005) to the analog tools used during testing. The app interface could use a little polish, and we wish there were a way to directly track wort/beer temperature in addition to ambient, but all-inall, it’s a useful and attractively priced tool to measure the progress of the most important stage in brewing.—hs