DIY beer color analysis

[ssgross]

My big projects over the last 5 years have been a closet yeast lab, and automating my 10 gallon system. The lab I finished 3 years ago and as of
last weekend there is a check in the box on the automation.

I was googling to decide on my next project and came across
http://store.publiclab.org/

What a neat idea! I'm thinking of asking Santa for a spectrometer kit. Is anyone doing this? Has done this? I am sure there must be some biology/chemistry beer nerds out there there that use their lab equipment on their beer (I happen to be a mathematician beer nerd, so no free access to million dollar toys for me!)

Can anyone offer a point in the right direction for using such a DIY spectrometer to analyze homebrew?

 

[IslandLizard]

For the price these are some pretty darn awesome toys, er, tools!

My expensive X-Rite spectrophotometer (for monitor and print calibration) should be able to multi-purpose like that <wishful thinking>.

I think a lot depends on how the driver and software manipulate the raw data into something sensible for us, humans and beer brewers alike.

 

[ajdelange]

If you have the attachment for calibration of projectors then yes but as it is your device is a reflection photometer only and you need one that can measure transmitted light.

If you can come up with an instrument that can make a calibrated absorption measurement in 1 cm at 430 nm you can do SRM. It is just 12.7 times the 1 cm absorption at that wavelength. If you can measure absorption from 380 - 780 nm you can do tristimulus color measurement and spectral deviation coefficient measurement (SRM plus a couple of SDCs).

 

[ssgross]

I saw other diy spectrophotometer somewhere that uses a 430nm led.

Sent from my SGH-M919 using Home Brew mobile app

 

[ajdelange]

I've experimented with those and found that you can measure SRM quite accurately if you put a 430 nm filter between the led and the detector. Absent that the bandwidth of the diode is too big and some (but not a lot) of error gets introduced. I started off with the idea of putting together a simple kit using a programmable chip but that idea sort of went by the wayside when I could not find a source for a cheap filter.