Why does cold brew tea have half the caffeine than hot tea, but cold brew coffee has more caffeine than hot coffee?
In: Chemistry
Almost certainly it’s the brew time. the solubility of caffeine is not great at low temperatures (thus takes longer to extract), so the tea was probably not brewed for very long.
another thing to consider for coffee is that hot water likely doesn’t contact the coffee for very long, where tea often is seeped for longer.
My best guess would be that the heat is required to extract any caffeine from the leaves. So while heating the caffeine destroys it in either case, with tea, heat is required to get any caffeine out of the tea leaves.
ELi5: heat gets rid of caffeine, but you need some heat to get the caffeine out of the plant quickly. Some plants need more heat to break the caffeine free from the plant.
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I will add that cold brew tends to be lacking bitterness, so I believe it is also quite common to mix it into an extra powerful mixture because we’re chasing the coffee taste.
Brewed beverages like these depends on a few factors to extract flavor and other compounds from the tea/coffee. The 3 most important are Contact Time, Surface Area, and Heat, each of which speed up extraction. When you put GROUND coffee in contact with water for 24 hours, you extract pretty much all the caffeine those grounds because you have lots of surface area from it being ground up and lots of time in contact with water. With tea, while it has a long contact time, it does not have the huge amount of surface area that ground coffee does. With hot tea, the heat is doing even more work relative to hot coffee because of the lack of surface area. When heat is removed from both, things like caffeine are extracted more quickly from ground coffee.
Cold brew vs. hot brew tea has no bearing on caffeine content. Whatever the maker does to it in the manufacturing process has far more impact on the caffeine content of the final drink than whether it’s cold or hot brewed.
My body has some weird sensitivity to caffeine, so I switched from drinking Mountain Dew, a soft drink notorious for high caffeine content, to Lipton iced tea. My symptoms actually got worse. Then, I looked it up online and apparently the Lipton tea I was drinking actually has three times the caffeine of Mountain Dew.
Cold brew coffee has roughly double the grounds to water ratio compared to hot coffee. Can’t speak to cold brew tea, never made it.
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