An Analysis of Ethanol in Commercial Liquors via Quantitative NMR Spectroscopy

• DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00117
• Publication Date: 2017-09-11T16:20:08Z
• Authors: Rebecca A. Hill; Christopher P. Ni...
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0503 education

NMR spectroscopy is traditionally introduced to students during Organic Chemistry as a tool used for structure elucidation and conformational analysis. NMR spectroscopy also has numerous applications beyond structure determination, including quantitative analysis of samples. For this study, an experiment was developed to use quantitative analysis functions of a 400 MHz NMR to quantify the ethanol content in different liquor samples during an Instrumental Analysis course. The concentrations of alcohol in vodka and other liquors were determined using the electronic reference to access in vivo concentrations (ERETIC) method embedded in the NMR processing software. ERETIC was used to analyze a proton NMR spectrum to define the concentration of ethanol in the reference sample, generate a calibration curve, and calculate the concentrations of ethanol in commercial samples.