This plant is often used as a tea, has uses in ayurvedic medicine, and recently has seen use being infused in alcohol for use in cocktails (and I think that may have been partially my fault).

I've been obsessed with the way it goes pink in the presence of acid for well over a decade, ever since I was at this high-end tea shop in West Vancouver, and the shopkeeper demonstrated it for me as a bit of a bonus, as I had been tasting my way through their gyokuro.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to open my own teashop, and one of our offerings was something called a "Twilight Lemonade", which was fresh squeezed lemonade with ice cubes of the infusion (or a float of vodka, for a boozy drink). The ice cubes would result in blue drops falling through the lemonade, leaving a pink trail on the way.

Fast forward to a few days ago, when I needed a pH indicator, but my Buchner, addition funnel, soxhlet and pH papers are stuck at customs (and it just occured to me why they might be holding them...).

My mind went back to the tea, and I remembered that I wanted to test it more thoroughly back when I didn't really have the equipment to do so, but now I do, so I did.

My initial findings are thus:

The dye is incredibly potent. It takes a ridiculously small amount of the powdered flower to make an indicator solution.

High concentrations of the dye show dichromatism, which I discovered by accident when making a test solution with what I thought was a small amount of powder, but made in a nearly opaque solution that filtered out to be a rather incredible mixture of purple and red colours.

When diluted to a useful strength, the solution is a distinct cobalt blue at a pH of 7.

When exposed to an acid, the solution turns bright pink. (Although we know that already)

When exposed to a base, the solution shows another strong color change to a rather stunning greenish teal, getting greener as the solution grows more basic.

Thats all of my observations thus far, and I was able to use it as an indicator get a basic (harhar) idea of the pH of a different solution I was working with.

I want to take this a step further, though, the colour changes are so stark that I think it might be able to be standardized for amateur use, given how cheap the flower is compared to how intense the dye is.

This is where I run into a problem of understanding what I need to do, but not how. My degree is in electronics, I've taken up chemistry as a hobby, and my weakness is knowing/understanding the maths (my brain is full of electronics equations).

I'm anticipating the following challenges, any advice with overcoming them (or whether they're worth worrying about) would be very helpful.

1. Standardizing concentration of dye solution from dried flower. I think any inconsistencies in the potency of the dye can largely be mitigated by finely powdering and sifting the flower to a uniform particle size.

2. Standardizing concentration of test solution from concentrate. This is where errors in the previous step will become more evident.

3. How much of the reagent under test to add to how much indicator solution? I know it's largely arbitrary, but affects calculation of the reference chart (i.e. add x amount of reagent under test to y amount of indicator then compare to chart)