How does someone come across the ability to use a bunch of chemicals to extract another chemical?
It just seems so wild to see what things they use to remove a substance from a leaf…How tf do people come across these things when its not natural and has to be processed?
In: 6
Think about how coffee works. You can eat the beans (according to tradition, an Ethiopian goat herder was said to have discovered the properties of caffeine when he noticed his goats “dancing” after eating coffee cherries) or grind them up and extract the caffeine with a solvent (water). If you evaporate the water you’re left with coffee solids, aka instant coffee.
Replace coffee with malted barley and you can extract the sugars to make a sweet liquor called wort. Replace malted barley with tea and you get, well, tea. People have been using hot water to extract medicinal or flavorful chemicals since ancient times. If water doesn’t extract the right chemicals you can try again with oil, or even alcohol. As new solvents are discovered you can experiment to see what they extract.
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