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

What you did is called distillation. Basically, you can separate the different parts of a liquid solution by taking advantage of the differing boiling points of its parts.

Water boils at a lower temperature than caffeine and, likely, most of the other stuff in coffee. By heating the coffee up enough to boil the water but not enough to boil that other stuff, the vapor that condenses will be almost entirely water while the rest of the stuff like caffeine will be left behind.