Where can you buy ascorbic acid?

Answer 1

In small quantities it can be purchased in most pharmacy's or natural health food stores.

Since ascorbic acid is the same as vitamin-c, depending on your usage, you can easily purchase a bottle of high potency vitamin-c supplements. This is less pure, yet reasonably effective form of obtaining ascorbic acid quite easily. You may want to buy a supplement that has a high concentration of vitamin-c per pill, while maintaining the smallest pill possible. The reason being is the larger the pill means the more filler the pill contains. The fillers in the pill are simply inert ingredients that help the pill maintain it's pill form. Usually mostly talc, maltodextrin, and/or glycerin, among others. From this point you can use a mortar and pestle, or a couple of table spoons and crush your pills into powder form quite easily, if you wish.

Another way to obtain small to moderate quantities of reasonably high grade crystalline ascorbic acid is from local home beer/wine brewery shops. It's used to balance out the PH of the beer/wine wort, add tartness, act as a preservative, add clarity/lighten the color of the beer, and other uses. It's often over-priced as shops have their own overhead, and home-brewing is a hobbyist, niche-market. But still a very accessible way to obtain ascorbic acid locally, in most cases.

You can also easily order it online, to purchase from bulk sizes to smaller jars. In the interest of providing examples of where you might search to find vendors to directly answer the question, I'll provide example online websites where you can type in "ascorbic acid" in the search and find a number of vendors.. You can search on Yahoo, at shopping.yahoo.com, and also on Amazon.com to name another. There are a number of vendors on both Yahoo Shopping, Amazon, and other websites if you search for them. Shipping tends to be high, but you can buy in large quantities and have a selection of brands, and types, from powdered, to crystalline, and I believe you can find it in concentrated liquid form in a tincture.