Some of us love the taste of coffee, but can’t handle the effects of caffeine. So how exactly do you take the caffeine from a coffee bean?
If you’re part of a cup of coffee minus the caffeine, then the next time you cook the kettle, you should lift your mug in memory of Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge.
Runge was a 19th-century German chemist who brought Goethe – the poet and statesman who was also an avid scientist – to the attention. Goethe had heard of Rare’s groundbreaking study of Belladonna, also known as nightshade. Runge had isolated the compound that diluted the eye muscles when it was ingested.
Goethe had recently been given a case of coffee beans, and so he asked Runge to perform an analysis of the beans. What Runge has discovered is arguably the most consumed drug in the modern world – caffeine.
But caffeine has a darker side, too.
It can cause anxiety, insomnia, diarrhea, excessive sweating, Heartbeats racing, and muscle tremors. For many people, the pleasure of drinking coffee is surpassed by caffeine-fed negatives.
Could caffeine be removed from coffee? The answer, as any supermarket corridor will tell you, is yes-but the process is not as simple as you might think.
The first person to strike a method of practical decapitation was another German, Ludwig Roselius… The head of the Kaffee HAG coffee company Roselius discovers the secret of decapitation by accident. In 1903, the shipment of coffee had been swollen by seawater in tritium-leaching caffeine but not the flavor. Roselius prepared an industrial method for repeating it, steaming beans with several acids before using solvent benzene to remove caffeine. Decaffeinated coffee was lacking, it turned out to be a possible carcinogen, so the search was looking for new techniques that could surprise the caffeine of the frijoles-and yet leave the flavored most of these techniques since the first days of decapitation are still being used today. But the process isn’t as simple as expected.
You might think it would be easier to roast coffee, grind it into the required powder (Express, filter, or instant), and then start the decaffeination process. It happens when coffee is green, before roasting.
If you were trying to decaffeinate roasted coffee, you would end up doing something that tastes a bit like straw. That is why the process is carried out on the green coffee stage with 99.9% of the decaffeinated coffee to this day.
There are several ways to decaffeinate coffee, but the most common is to soak it in a solvent – usually methylene chloride or ethyl acetate. Methylene chloride can be used as a color absabite and degreasing, as well as as a means of removing caffeine.
Ethyl acetate, Meanwhile, a natural fruit ether, usually made from acetic acid – the building block of vinegar – is also used to make nail polish remover (it has a distinctive sweet smell, similar to pear drops).
The beans are first soaked in water and then covered in a solution. containing one of these solvents. The caffeine is then extracted from the solvent.
The solvent-containing water is then reused again and again until it is packed with coffee flavors and compounds – quite identical to the beans, except caffeine and solvent. At this stage of the process, the beans lose very little aroma because they are essentially soaked in a concentrated coffee essence.
Soaking coffee beans in solvents does not sound like a particularly healthy company, but both active ingredients have a clean bill of health. In 1985, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared that the likelihood of a health risk from methylene chloride was so low that “it is essentially non-existent.” (THE FDA rules allow up to 10 parts per million residual methylene, but coffee decaffeination typically uses solutions with one part per million).
Ethyl acetate is a natural fruit ether that is usually made from acetic acid – the building block of vinegar – and it is also used to make nail polish remover (it has a distinctive sweet smell, similar to pear drops).
The beans are first soaked in water and then covered in a solution with one of these solvents. The caffeine is then extracted from the solvent.
The solvent-containing water is then reused again and again until it is packed with coffee flavors and compounds – quite identical to the beans, except caffeine and solvent. Through this phase of the process, the beans lose very little aroma because they are essentially soaked in a concentrated coffee essence.
Soaking coffee beans in solvents does not sound like a particularly healthy company, but both agents have a clean bill of health. In 1985, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared that the likelihood of a health risk from methylene chloride was so low that “it is essentially non-existent.” (FDA rules allow up to 10 parts per million residual methylene, but coffee decaffeination generally uses solutions with one part per million).
Decaflination became much more widespread since instant coffee became a staple
Dos other methods use water. The Swiss Water method sees beans soaked with water; the caffeine-rich solution (full of flavors) is strained through the activated charcoal that captures caffeine. Starting in Switzerland in the 1930s, the process was first used commercially in 1979. He got favor because it was the first decapsulation method not to use solvents.
There is another method that involves the use of “supercritical carbon dioxide”. Beans that have been soaked in water are put into a stainless steel extractor that is then sealed, and liquid CO2 crashed into pressures of up to 1,000lbs per square inch. Like the Swiss water method, it is the C02 that binds with caffeine molecules, removing them from the unroasted bean. The gas is extracted and the pressure is lowered, leaving caffeine in a chamber.
It can be extremely expensive.
