Alcohol Concentration

[tashbaird]

I really desperately need a procedure to determine the concentration of alcohol in wine by titration. The one method we've got our teacher now says is not appropriate (of course she waited until we were already experimenting to say this ). Our current method uses potassium dichromate so if theres another one out there, PLEASE HELP!

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

Here is a method of determining alcohol by titration(probably the one you were using?)

http://www.tbc.school.nz/elearning/depa ... lcohol.pdf

Here is a minor variant on the technique:
http://www.outreach.canterbury.ac.nz/ch ... anol.shtml

You may be interested in pages 83 to 91 in this PDF
http://www3.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/chemistry/f ... Cheung.pdf

You may find this site useful. It seems to have a lot of relevant resources:

http://www.chemistry-react.org/go/texto ... t_330.html

Here is a spectrophotometric method using cerium oxidation:
http://cobalt.chem.wwu.edu/labs/Chem123 ... 202008.pdf

http://oxygen.chem.uidaho.edu/ifcchem11 ... s/Wine.pdf


There are quite a number of methods for determining alcohol in liquids. Here is a brief overview comparison of a few of the more common methods:

http://www.vintessential.com/pdf/Alcohol%20Analysis.pdf


Here is a commercial site giving a comparison of some common instruments:

http://www.ibrew.com.au/html/spirits/al ... nt%20.html

Here is a book review that includes ethanol analysis techniques - check the table of contents to link to the right spot. This book might be available on interlibrary loan - see your local library.

http://books.google.com/books?id=LHHup5 ... #PPA140,M1

You may be interested in the official ATF procedures for determining alcolhol content:

http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/te ... ain_02.tpl

If you still want more, I recommend using a search of Chemical Abstracts, which should produce more relevant literature than you can possibly read. I am sorry, but a fairly determined search appears to turn up dichromate oxidation of ethanol as the a fairly universal standard for determination of ethanol in wine by titration. Have you explored this with your teacher?

Good luck on the project!!! And above all else, have fun with it!

Best regards,
Barrett L. Tomlinson