Hey, I'm Ben Bowlin.
And I'm Jonathan Strickland.
And today's question is how do we
do is decaffeinate coffee or tea?
Why would you want to do such a thing?
Not everybody likes the effects of caffeine.
Blasphemy.
But for those people, we have to have a process
to extract caffeine from the plant products in which it
occurs.
There are four methods of extraction, which we primarily
use.
Let's see, there's brute force, coercion, subversion,
and nuking from orbit because it's the only way to be sure.
There are four real versions used to extract caffeine.
The first would be methylene chloride processing.
Then there's ethyl acetate processing.
Not your Aunt Ethel.
I would hope not.
Then there's carbon dioxide processing
and water processing.
Methylene chloride is a solvent and is used to extract caffeine
from not just coffee, but a lot of other materials.
So first, you soften the material up, in a water bath
or by exposing it to steam.
That process of extraction also extracts the oil
and the flavor, all the good stuff.
So you would end up with a really weak cup
of decaf coffee.
Yes.
Weak to the point of whackness.
So what's the solution?
It literally is a solution.
You take the solution out of the extraction.
You expose that to methylene chloride.
And the methylene chloride removes the caffeine.
You put the solution back with the material.
And you got your oils.
You got your flavorings.
But what you don't have is--?
Caffeine.
Ah, methylene chloride molecules and caffeine molecules,
they bond.
They tend to make a connection.
Kind of like us.
Ethyl acetate is a similar process.
In fact, it's exactly the same.
If you picture a Mad Lib version of the methylene chloride
process, just write in ethyl acetate.
So you should just rewind this video by about 45 seconds,
watch it again, but just mentally replace those words.
That's what we would do.
Ethyl acetate process products are the ones
that you hear sold as (NEW AGE-Y VOICE) naturally decaffeinated.
(NORMAL VOICE) It turns out that ethyl acetate
is a chemical that naturally occurs in fruits.
Right.
So this naturally occurring chemical
is then applied to a very unnatural process, giving us
natural decaffeination.
I'm sure there's an asterisk in there somewhere.
The third way to decaffeinate a material
is called carbon dioxide processing.
You're essentially softening and pressure cooking the material
with carbon dioxide.
Once you have the high pressure and the high temperature,
carbon dioxide reaches a super critical state,
meaning it functions both as a liquid and a gas.
Last time I was in a super critical state,
I was actually passing through Nebraska.
[DRUMROLL]
It becomes a solvent with its small nonpolar
molecules attracting the small caffeine molecules.
Since flavor molecules are larger,
they remain intact in the material.
Water extraction might be familiar to most people.
The material is soaked in hot water,
then that water is moved through a carbon filter.
The carbon filter grabs the caffeine molecules
and holds on to them.
The water's then returned to the beans for reabsorption
of the flavors and the oils.
If there's one thing I cannot stand about decaffeinated
coffee, it's that has no caffeine in it.
But there's two things I can't stand,
it's when it's weak and just doesn't have the flavor.
What we like to say around the office
is if you lose the flavor--
You lose Strickland.
Caffeine is not removed completely
by any of these methods.
Under Federal regulation in the United States,
you can't call something decaffeinated
unless it has less than 2.5% of the original caffeine.
And you can't call me at all unless I
have at least 2.5% caffeine in my bloodstream.
So that's how decaffeination works.
We hope you enjoyed watching this video.
So if you want to write to us with a suggestion--
A question.
--drop us a line or send us an email.
Ooh, ooh, I actually have a question right now.
Yup.
So we live in the southeastern United States,
and there's such a thing called unsweetened tea.
Now, does that actually mean that they first sweeten the tea
and then have a process to extract the sugar from the tea,
thus making it unsweetened tea?
Are we still rolling?