Coffee beans have caffeine naturally in them. How is the caffeine removed from them to create decaffeinated coffee?
In: 3655
ELI5 answer: Caffeine dissolves much easier than *most*, not all, other parts of coffee. So companies can use chemicals and/or water to dissolve the caffeine out before they roast the beans and it’s almost unchanged aside from the caffeine being gone. Voila, decaffeinated coffee.
Edit: Damn, some people on here know some incredibly smart 5 year olds.
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.
There are a bunch of different methods of decaffeination but the ELI5 version is as follows. Either
1. unroasted coffee beans are exposed to a chemical solvent that only bonds to caffeine and not to other chemical compounds present in coffee
2. unroasted coffee beans have more or less every chemical compound removed from them (typically via water), the caffeine is isolated and removed, and then the remaining compounds are re-introduced to the now “empty” unroasted coffee.
Process number one is more efficient and generally makes for better tasting coffee but uses the kinds of chemicals present in paint thinners. Process number two is less efficient and results in worse tasting coffee but uses no chemicals beyond water.
At an industrial scale they use super critical CO2 to extract it. Caffeine dissolves into the stream and the extreme cold breaks the cell walls allowing it to get inside the plant cells.
Latest Answers