Coffee without the jitters: Here’s all you need to know about decaffeinated coffee

( Natural News ) Coffee is a much-loved drink, but not everyone likes the palpitations that come along with it. In the course of its long history, chemists have devised multiple methods to decaffeinate, or remove caffeine from, coffee beans, ensuring that coffee-lovers will still be able to get a good night’s sleep. The history of decaf coffee The story of decaffeinated coffee began with a visit between friends in Germany. On October 3, 1819, Friedlib Ferdinand Runge, a chemist, paid a visit to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the creator of Faust. The writer gave his friend a box of coffee beans he got from Greece and asked him to experiment on it. He wanted to find out why the coffee beans kept him awake at night. After two years, von Goethe got his answer – Runge had identified the culprit to be caffeine. It would be almost a century later that decaffeinated coffee was discovered. In 1905, Ludwig Roselius, a former coffee bean roaster, was believed to have received a cargo of coffee beans soaked in seawater. Instead of tossing them out as damaged goods, Roselius and his colleagues considered this as an opportunity. After a series of experiments, they discovered that using benzene – a chemical found in paint strippers and aftershave – as a solvent could remove the caffeine. They patented this process, and Roselius founded the Kaffee Handels-Aktiengesellschaft or Kaffee Hag, a company that exported decaffeinated coffee across Europe and then to the U.S. after World War I. However, with benzene being a toxic chemical, using it posed a number of health concerns . It was later replaced by ethyl acetate or methylene chloride. This was called the “direct method.” As ethyl acetate could be extracted from fruits and vegetables, people thought it was a […]

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