10% of the coffee consumed is decaf coffee.
4 reasons why one drinks decaf coffee.
- Because after 3 l caffeinated coffee one also need a break 😉
- Because you want to drink coffee in the evening and would stay awake the whole night.
- Because you can not digest caffeine.
- Otherwise always applies: Because you can!
Decaf Coffee: Who invented it?
- The Bremen coffee merchant and founder of “Kaffee HAG“, Ludwig Roselius, led the death of his father among other things on an excessive coffee consume.
- So he developed the Roselius process in 1903 to extract the coffee from the bean.
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Decaf Coffee Methods
Roselius Method
- For this purpose, the raw beans were pickled into salt water, and then the caffeine was extracted with the help of benzene.
- Since benzene is now regarded as carcinogenic, the method is no longer used.
Direct Method
- It is often used today and quite cheap.
- Here, the raw coffee beans are left to swell in hot water or steam and then treated with solvents for 10 h.
- Dichloromethane: is under suspicion of being carcinogenic.
- Ethyl acetate: a natural solvent, which can be obtained from fruits and vegetables – the coffee is then called “naturally decaffeinated”
- Then, the beans are dried, so that the solvents volatilize – even if a very small proportion can remain. This should not be the case after the roasting.
- According to the EU directive, the coffee may also be called caffeine-free containing up to 0.1 % caffeine.
Swiss water process
- Developed by the Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee Company in the late 1970s.
- First, the green beans are treated with hot water until all of the caffeine and other solid components have been dissolved out. These beans are then disposed of.
- The water with the dissolved caffeine and other coffee components then runs through an activated carbon filter to remove the caffeine molecules.
- New green coffee beans are added to this decaffeinated water.
- Since the water is already enriched with dissolved coffee components, this time only the caffeine is dissolved and the other taste-determining ingredients of the coffee beans are retained.
- The process is repeated until the desired level of decaffeination is achieved.
- Then the beans are dried and roasted as usual.
- No Coffee* offers this type of coffee, for example.
Further Decaf Coffee Methods
- Indirect process, carbon dioxide process, triglyceride process
Decaf Coffee Alternatives
- Working groups at the universities of Glasgow, Tokyo and the Institute Integrated Coffee Technologies in Hawaii are researching the production of caffeine-free Arabice coffee plants using genetic engineering.
- Further approaches are hybridization, breeding and mutagenesis.
- But there are also coffee species, which contain little or no caffeine by nature.
- Coffea charrieriana from Cameroon.
- In 2004, Brazilian scientists discovered Arabica shrubs in Ethiopia which, due to mutation, lack an enzyme necessary for the conversion of a chemical precursor to caffeine.
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