Why when you evaporate coffee and store the steam until it becomes liquid again, the liquid no longer has the color of coffee?

Question

I did this experiment one day because I was curious, sorry if it’s a stupid question

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Different materials have different physical properties. Properties like boiling point. It’s the same principle at play in petroleum distillation. Kerosene vapourizes at a different temperature than gasoline which vapourizes at a different temperature than diesel, etc. They evapourate and rise up a column to a certain height according to that temperature, where they are then sucked away and condensed back into liquid, but purified from their origin in crude oil.

Do that to anything and you get distilled constituents. One constituent (water in this case) evapourates at 100 °C(212 °F). In order to vapourize the constituents in coffee that make it black (really dark brown), it would take considerably more heat. So, heat coffee do only 100 °C, only the water evapourates. The other constituents don’t, and are left behind.

Again, the same principle is at play in how seawater evapourates off the ocean, but it falls as freshwater rain inland. It would be a very different planet if rain was salt water.