Why does cold brew tea have half the caffeine than hot tea, but cold brew coffee has more caffeine than hot coffee?
In: Chemistry
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.
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