Huh, how *do* they make decaf coffee?

Posted By Hup | March 21, 2009


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The path that Stephanie and I walk every Saturday morning

As Stephanie and I were doing our weekly Saturday morning walk down to Whole Foods and Peets Coffee to grab some breakfast (see the path on Google Maps), we somehow got on the subject of how decaf coffee is made. You see, a while back I decided to cut out the caffeine from my diet due to the fact that it was making me feel even more wired than I am normally, not to mention that I was beginning to feel like I had to have coffee, a Mountain Dew or some type of boost during the day to make it through. I don’t like to feel like I’m addicted to stuff, so I simply cut it out of my routine. It wasn’t easy, but it somehow worked.

Anyways, Stephanie still loves her caffeine kick, so when we go to Peet’s Coffee during our walk on Saturdays I either pass on getting a drink or I grab a decaf version of whatever she ends up getting (which this morning was a vanilla latte). Well, as I was ordering my decaf version (Stephanie calls it the ‘grandpa’ version), I asked Stephanie how decaf coffee beans were different from regular coffee beans. She had no clue what the difference was, so I asked the guy who was making our drinks. To my surprise, he didn’t have an answer for me, either, which I thought was interesting.

When we got home I jumped on The Wikipedia so that I could find the answer that I was looking for. As usual, Wikipedia didn’t fail me and within a matter of seconds I was reading all about Decaffeination. Here’s a summary of what I found out:

Decaffeination is the act of removing caffeine from coffee beans, mate, cocoa, tea leaves and other caffeine-containing materials. (While caffeine-free soft drinks are occasionally referred to as “decaffeinated,” some are better termed “uncaffeinated”: prepared via simply omitting caffeine from production.)

In the case of coffee, various methods can be used. The process is usually performed on unroasted (green) beans, and starts with steaming of the beans. They are then rinsed in solvent that contains as much of the chemical composition of coffee as possible without also containing the caffeine in a soluble form. The process is repeated anywhere from 8 to 12 times until it meets either the international standard of having removed 97% of the caffeine in the beans or the EU standard of having the beans 99.9% caffeine free by mass. Coffee contains over 400 chemicals important to the taste and aroma of the final drink; this effectively means that no physical process or chemical reaction will remove only caffeine while leaving the other chemicals at their original concentrations.

Interesting, eh? I also found out that in 2004 there was a new type of Coffea Arabica coffee bean found in Ethiopia that contains about half the caffeine as the normal stuff.

Also, if you happen to be curious about the caffeine content of different types of drinks, check out this handy-dandy chart that I found. The most interesting thing that I noticed was that a Red Bull contains 80mg of caffeine, while a Grande Starbucks coffee has an incredible 330mg of caffeine! Yeah, that’s a lot.

Filed Under palo alto, relationship stuff

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    3 Talkies! to “Huh, how *do* they make decaf coffee?”

    1. Beth on March 27th, 2009 5:32 pm

      I learn the most interesting things from reading this blog! Keep up the great writing!

    2. sheena on January 8th, 2010 8:14 am

      So i want to know more about decaf coffee.i will like to konw what do u guys take out of the coffee.i know that u talk out csffeine but what more

    3. sheena on January 8th, 2010 8:18 am

      So i want to know more about decaf coffee.I know that u take out caffeine but what more?

    What do you want to tell us, hmmm?