eli5 How exactly does one “de-caffeinate” coffee? Are they actually removing the chemical?
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The most popular method, the Swiss water method, works by essentially extracting all the flavor out of some coffee with water and removing the caffeine from it.
Now that you have a bunch of caffeine free, coffee flavored water, you dry and submerge new beans in that solution. Since stuff like caffeine wants to be evenly distributed, it’ll leave the beans which are full of caffeine and enter the water which has no caffeine.
If you didn’t make the coffee flavored water, that coffee flavor also would’ve left the beans but thankfully the water solution helps keep it intact.
Now that some caffeine is in the water, the water has its caffeine removed and reinserted back into the mix and we’re back to step one. Over time, they’ll do this until nearly all the caffeine in the beans are gone.
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