EasyDens from Anton Paar

Anyone on here uses as an inexpensive alternative to a DNA 35 Densiometer?

No, but I’d be interested if there was one.

It’s slated for the beer industry can be applied to wine according to Anton Paar - and comes in under $400 . . . the samples need to be degassed and solids removed, but that’s pretty easy (and that’s one of the reasons it’s so much cheaper than the easy to use DNA35, which comes in at $2500)

Cheers

I’ve been using the handheld Anton Paar sold by Morewinemaking for three vintages and it works really well. It looks like it is currently sold for $339 if you have a pro account. It works so well that our facility manager bought one for the other winemakers in our shared space. We primarily use the unit to follow fermentation progress and velocity with absolute and accurate Brix values being less important so we typically don’t bother to degas wine samples. We do find it to provide extremely quick and repeatable results and it is great for detecting stable Brix numbers indicating the completion of fermentation which we then confirm with wet chemistry.

One thing to look out for is that the rear battery hatch is not that water resistant. We take the batteries out after each use as we have seen slightly damp batteries if the unit has gotten excess moisture on it - the same has been seen in the other unit in our winemaking facility. Another thing to look out for is that the original App used to interface with device via Bluetooth was sun setted in December 2021 and I haven’t successfully used the new App yet - when we tried to use the new App during harvest in September it didn’t work properly and I’m curious to see if they start charging for additional features. I’ll give it a go this week to see if anything has changed.