During this talk I will discuss the background, motivation and methods of two projects I have worked on in tandem for the past two years. (1) I am interested in the age and evolution of young brown dwarfs, which occupy the mass regime between stars and planets. I seek to assess the validity of current brown dwarf evolutionary models with the growing known population of these objects. Using high resolution (R~45,000) spectra from the Immersion GRating INfrared Spectrograph (IGRINS), I will empirically populate log(g) -- T_eff parameter space with intermediate-age brown dwarfs. IGRINS reaches high resolution because of the clever physics utilized by the spectrograph's silicon immersion gratings. For any future instrument that employs our immersion gratings to perform well, these gratings must be well characterized beforehand to mitigate potential alignment-related delays during installation and potential leaks in the overall throughput of the instrument. One such characteristic that must be accurately/precisely determined is the blaze angle of the grating. (2) I will present my project and its role in precisely characterizing the blaze angle of our in-house fabrication silicon immersion gratings. I build on and develop multiple measurement methods with varying levels of precision, including an all encompassing theoretical geometric model of our blazed gratings and their efficiency as a function of imperfect blaze. Together these methods give us the ability to develop the most efficient optics for our instruments, therefore unlocking new and exciting science that they can achieve.