A question for the home brewers out there who know a lot of chem. One of the biggest problems with home brewing is verifying that the raw active ingredients you order are in fact what you ordered. You order estradiol enanthate or some other ingredient from a manufacturer, and an unknown white powder shows up at your door. There are crude testing methods available like the melting point test, but they are limited. There are also testing services like janoshik out there, but they’re expensive and involve shipping samples internationally. With shipping, testing a single specimen with a service like janoshik can be $100-$200.
I know dedicated dedicated optical spectrophotometers like these exist. While accurate, these units are big, bulky, expensive, and not really suitable for the kinds of simple compact labs home brewers use.
I stumbled across this video describing a little cheap spectrometer available from a small shop in China. The videos I can find of it only show measuring the spectra of various light bulbs. However, I’m wondering if it’s possible to use such a device to measure the purity of specimens of estradiol enanthate and other HRT medications.
I’m not an expert in spectrometry by any means, but I am aware of the general process. With a dedicated desktop spectrophotometer, you create a calibration/standard curve by measuring the spectrum of solutions of different concentrations prepared with a sample of known purity. Then you use that curve to measure the concentration of your unknown specimen.
But the big desktop units are designed from the ground up to do this. You place solutions in dedicated transparent cuvettes. Everything is in a single fixed unit designed for this purpose.
But is it possible to do something similar using just a simple spectrometer? Could you maybe buy such a spectrometer, bolt it to a surface, and cobble together some means of holding a cuvette? If you could fix the cuvette, light source, and detector a fixed distances from each other, then perhaps you could use such a device to cobble together a basic simple optical spectrophotometer?
Would this actually work? My thought is that while this wouldn’t be the most accurate spectrophotometer out there, ultimately it doesn’t matter. The goal of testing raws is not to measure their concentration to four significant figures. The goal is simply to verify you have the right compound and to ensure that it hasn’t been cut with fillers. Even if such a setup had an error rate of a few percent, this would still be perfectly acceptable for raws testing.
I hope I’m explaining this question well enough. I’m really just wondering if a simple cheap usb spectrometer like this one here could be used or modified into a device that can measure raws concentrations.
I think it is important to seperate the two ideas you’re referencing. Testing purity requires different techniques than concentration testing.
You could theoretically estimate the purity of your compound of interest if you had a fairly good idea of what the impurities were. Spectroscopic techniques are generally used for identification of the impurity causing compounds and not for purity testing.
On the specific device you mentioned: I don’t believe that device would be useful/sufficient for two reasons. Firstly, like most inexpensive/small spectrometers, the spectrometer linked is a visible light spectrometer. Visible light spectroscopy is not very useful for organic compounds as organic compounds don’t tend to absorb in the visible region (which is why your feedstock is a white powder). This would be the primary limiting factor in regards to concentration testing. The other problem with that kind of device is the limited wavelength resolution which would make it rather difficult to identify impurities.
If you wanted to get a good idea of the impurities of a feed stock, the best options would be GCMS or HPLC. HPLC would probably be the better of the two for a small scale chemical operation, given that it doesn’t need a constant supply of pure gas like GCMS.
Administration techniques are your best friend here. You must be converting your feedstock into an oraly administered drug. If you don’t have the equipment and/or supply chain information to ensure what you are putting in your body doesn’t contain harmful side products, you absolutely must use your body’s natural filtration system to protect yourself.
Without reading a lot more and having a good idea of how the feedstocks are synthesized, I wouldn’t feel comfortable administering these compounds without some kind of atomic absorption spectroscopy to look for heavy metal reminants from the synthesis process. It is entirely possible that the methods used to synthesize these compounds don’t ever use possibly toxic compounds, but I don’t know and cannot say.
Also, even if you don’t know the answer to this, if you happen to know a better place to ask this question, please let me know.
If your issue is that you’re not sure whether the molecule you ordered is the one that showed up, you need to know something about how the compound and potential fillers interact with light. In a lab you wouldn’t use a spectrophotometer, you’d do something like GC/MS or IR spectroscopy. If the issue is whether it’s got the right enantiomer, you might be able to do something with a crude spectrophotometer if you had a way to polarize the light but that’s above my pay grade.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
