An apparatus and an experimental procedure, mainly designed to investigate the thermodynamics and kinetics of hydrogen evolution in materials, are described. Employing a 30 ns ruby laser pulse as a heat source, this method probes H behavior at higher temperatures and on a much shorter time scale than classic thermal desorption. Precise calibration techniques for the laser fluence and the desorption yield have been developed. The absolute calibration agrees well with a measurement of the H content by elastic recoil detection. Particular attention has been paid to lateral uniformization of the laser intensity, to allow valid one‐dimensional modeling of laser heating and H evolution, and extraction of the activation energies and kinetic factors. As an example, a cursory study of intrinsic H in Be is presented. The method is also applicable to other volatile dopants.