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

In a nut shell you have simple distillation happening. Water vapor is leaving the main liquid source as a gas form, leaving the rest behind. The coffee parts do not become gas so they stay behind. To sum it up, basically there are two parts of the coffee to consider 1. The coffee 2. The water. And the water is the only part that steams. The reason it may smell like coffee is because there are smelly compounds that do evaporate with the water, but the compounds that have color don’t.