The Secret Processes That Strip Caffeine and Alcohol—Revealed!
The fourth common method used to decaffeinate coffee – and tea, by the way – is perhaps the most exotic: the supercritical carbon dioxide method. As we all learned in elementary school, matter can exist in three basic forms: solid, liquid, and gas (and yes, I hear all you pedants screaming: also plasma – but that is outside the scope of this discussion). Which of these states a particular substance exists in depends on two factors: pressure and temperature. For example, at low temperatures and pressures, Carbon Dioxide is a gas. At low temperatures and high pressures it is a liquid, while at even lower temperatures and higher pressures it is a solid – what we typically call dry ice. However, above 304.128 Kelvin and 7.3773 Megapascals – what is known as the critical point – Carbon Dioxide undergoes a strange transformation, attaining a state halfway between a liquid and a gas. This phase, known as supercritical carbon dioxide, is an excellent and versatile solvent, and widely used in industry for countless tasks including dry cleaning clothing, extracting essential oils and other plant compounds, cleaning pesticides from grain and other crops – and extracting caffeine from coffee beans and tea. Compared to regular organic solvents, supercritical carbon dioxide does less damage to extracted compounds, evaporates completely when its pressure is increased, and leaves behind no toxic residues. And while it is more expensive than other methods, it can more quickly process large volumes of coffee beans. Furthermore, it more efficiently extracts pure caffeine as a byproduct, which can then be sold for inclusion in caffeine pills, cold medications, energy drinks, and other products – and for more on another state of matter that seemingly defies logic, please check out our previous video The Weirdest Substance Known to Science.
But whatever process is used, today decaf coffee makes up around 12% of total global coffee consumption – a number that is steadily growing year by year. However, it is important to not that while coffee and tea treated with the aforementioned processes are marketed as “decaffeinated”, they are not, in fact, entirely caffeine-free. Indeed, according to FDA regulations, coffee is considered decaffeinated when at least 97% of its original caffeine content has been removed. Beyond this, the actual caffeine content will vary significantly from brand-to-brand. So if you are someone whose body is sensitive to even small amounts of caffeine, it is probably best to avoid decaffeinated coffee or tea altogether and stick to herbal tea, hot chocolate, and other alternatives. Or you may want to try out one of the newest entries in the field of decaffeinated beverages: naturally caffeine-free coffee. Coffeea charrieriana, also known as Charrier Coffee, is a member of the Coffea genus native to Cameroon in Central Africa whose beans naturally contain no caffeine. Though cultivated and sold by a few coffee producers, Charrier coffee is widely considered inferior-tasting to its more famous caffeinated cousin, Coffea arabica, and has yet to catch on even with regular decaf coffee drinkers. However, several efforts are underway to hybridize Coffea charrieriana and Coffee arabica – or even genetically modify either species – to produce a naturally caffeine-free cultivar that preserves the flavour profile of regular coffee.
Low and non-alcoholic wines and beers, on the other hand, have a much longer history – if only because these beverages are significantly older than coffee and tea. In the Middle Ages, brewers commonly produced small beer containing only 2-3% alcohol by volume, which was drunk by absolutely everyone – including children. Regular drinking water was often contaminated with bacteria and parasites, which were killed off by the boiling and fermentation processes used in brewing.
De-alcoholized wine and beer, however, are more recent developments. Seeking to prevent inebriation among his parishioners, in 1869, American Methodist minister and teetotaler Thomas Bramwell Welch invented a flash-pasteurization process to prevent grape juice from fermenting. The resulting product, dubbed “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine”, was marketed to churches as a non-alcoholic substitute for communion wine. The company Welch founded and which bears his name still exists today, and is best known for its line of grape and other fruit juices, jams, and snacks. Four decades later in 1908, the vineyard of Maria Jung in Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany, experienced an unexpected slump in sales. Upon contacting her usual clients, Jung discovered that they were increasingly choosing to abstain from alcohol for health reasons. After pondering the problem, Jung came up with an innovative solution: why not use the distillery the family also owned to boil off the alcohol, producing non-alcoholic wine? Her son Carl – no relation to the famous psychoanalyst – soon developed a vacuum distillation process that better preserved the original flavour of the wine, and a German tradition of non-alcoholic wine was born.
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