Pretreatment of biomass invariably produces lignin degradation products.  Due to the wide range of structural variation in lignins present in various feedstocks, characterization of these degradation products can be a challenge.  The concern here is twofold:  often these degradation products have an inhibitory effect on downstream processing, but conversely these molecules could be utilized as precursors for specialty chemicals if their structure could be determined.  Most current methods for analyzing lignin hydrolyzates are very complex and expensive, and often are not practical for commercial applications.  A methodology will be presented where lignin degradation products are evaluated for individual hydrolyzate streams using simplified analytical methods better suited to the commercial biorefinery laboratory.