Coffee beans have caffeine naturally in them. How is the caffeine removed from them to create decaffeinated coffee?
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Wow all of these “Best” answers suck. There are 3 ways to remove caffeine from coffee. All of them involve using solvents to extract / remove the caffeine from the green (pre-roasted) coffee beans.
The original method uses chemical solvents (some of which can cause cancer) to essentially “pull” the caffeine out of the beans.
The “Swiss water process” is very similar but only uses water and long periods of time as the solvent, thus avoiding any carcinogenic chemicals but often times diluting the natural flavor of the beans.
The 3rd method, which is fairly old but upcoming in popularity due to technological advances, uses “supercritical CO2” (basically carbon dioxide that is hyper-pressurized) as the solvent to pull the caffeine out of the beans while avoiding both loss of flavor and use of carcinogenic materials.
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