What would you do with a Spectrometer?

[The_Glue]

DISCLAIMER: I have never used a spectrometer, just have a vague idea of what it can do

Since DIY/Affordable spectrometers are getting closer and closer i started to think about how could we better our brews by using one.

http://hackaday.io/project/1279

Here is a cool article about a company who can sort of predict the success/score of your wine via analysing grape samples and comparing the data to a huge data base created over years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/magazine/07ENOLOGI.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

This is of course not possible in the beer world but there could be a lot of other uses. (just a few ideas like analyzing commercial beers, hop oil experiments, detecting off-taste components etc.)

 

[ajdelange]

Spectrophotometry is extensively used in breweries to analyze things like diacetyl content, FAN, bitterness, color and water parameters such as chloride content, hardness, silica, trace metals etc. But this is ordinary spectroscopy. The gadget referred to in the link you give is a Raman spectrometer which is a very different beast. I am sure Raman spectroscopy has uses in brewing research but I wouldn't know what they are. I also imagine that a Raman instrument, given what is required of it, would be much more expensive than the conventional UV/Vis spectrophotomer likely to be found in a brewery's laboratory.

 

[The_Glue]

I'v found some ordinary spectrometers but most of their descriptions seemed unsuitable for the job, like they comparing your results to their own limited database which have different goals than analyzing beer.

Do you think something like this could eventually tell me how much DMS, sulfates, ethanol etc. i have in my beer or i shouldn't get too excited yet?

http://hackaday.io/project/1342

 

[ajdelange]

Do you think something like this could eventually tell me how much DMS, sulfates, ethanol etc. i have in my beer or i shouldn't get too excited yet?

http://hackaday.io/project/1342

As I said in the previous post spectrophotometers are widely used in brewery labs. Perhaps the most common applications are in determining beer bitterness and color (the former requires that the instrument be UV capable which adds to its cost). That's what I use it for mostly but then I'm doing research on beer color.

DMS would be done by gas chromatographic analysis of the headspace. Sulfate can be determined by adding barium chloride with special chemicals to keep the barium sulfate in suspension and using the photometer as a turbidimeter (scattered light does not reach the detector). Ethanol is determined by distillation and measurement of the distillate's density or by infra red spectroscopy or by gas chromatography.