I did this experiment one day because I was curious, sorry if it’s a stupid question
In: Chemistry
This is the same reason rain isn’t salty even though a lot of clouds are formed from water evaporated from the oceans.
Evaporation is a process of changing the physical state of water (though other liquids can also be evaporated at different temperatures and pressures), so evaporation doesn’t affect the molecules of coffee that are dissolved in the water, just as salt doesn’t evaporate from the sea. You can also see this in cooking, especially if you’re making soup or a sauce. If you keep it hot enough for steam to rise, you can reduce the water in whatever you’re cooking, which makes the result a thicker version of whatever you’re cooking. If you simmer a pot of soup with the lid off for a couple of hours you will see the level fall, but virtually none of the food or seasonings left the pot!
The evaporation process forces water from a liquid into a gas, so even if the water has dissolved material in it (like sugar, salt, or coffee) it isn’t *chemically* bonded, and the molecules of water relatively easy just leave behind the rest of the “stuff” because those solids are not going to change into a gas.
One other way to look at it is to drop a few drops of water onto a hot pan: they quickly boil, sizzle, and evaporate, but they don’t take any of the pan with them, and water can just as easily leave other material behind when it evaporates, even though those dissolved particles – e.g. salt, sugar, or coffee – are much smaller than the big metal pan. This last one is only as helpful as you want it to be, we wouldn’t expect water to “carry” a pan up into the air when it evaporates!
Latest Answers