What is Decaf Coffee?

What is Decaf Coffee?

Although some people love the taste of coffee, they prefer decaffeinated coffee because they are uncomfortable with the caffeine it contains. However, the process of decaffeinating coffee is not as easy as it seems.
Coffee beans naturally contain caffeine. However, even though coffee beans are processed in order to remove their stimulating effects, it still contains some caffeine in its content so that you can drink coffee at night without sleep deprivation.
 
How the Story of “Decaffeination” Started
   The history of coffee, called decaf coffee, dates back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe one day; He sees chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge working on how the deadly nightshade dilates a cat's pupil and is impressed. He then gives this chemist a can of coffee beans from Greece and commissions the chemist to investigate how these beans keep him up all night.
A few years later, Runge goes down in history as the scientist who first identified and isolated a substance called caffeine.
Runge did not continue to work on this issue and did not use decaffeinated coffee production for commercial purposes.

 The first commercially available technique for decaffeinating coffee was discovered in 1903 by German merchant Ludwig Roselius and his workers and patented in 1906. In 1903, he realized that the coffee beans in the coffee sack they accidentally dropped into the sea had lost their caffeine without losing their aroma. This original technique was used by steaming with various acids or bases and later benzene, caffeine as solvent. Due to its health hazards, benzene is not used as a caffeine solvent today.

 Roselius applied this to the production system, first steaming the beans with some acids and finally decaffeinating using benzene. Thus, decaffeinated coffee was born.
 However, when the carcinogenic property of benzene emerged, new techniques were emphasized. Some of them are still used today. However, this is not an easy process.
   Coffee companies do not do this themselves. Most of the companies established just for this business are in Europe, Canada, USA and South America.
Methods Used to Obtain Decaffeinated Coffee
Swiss Water Process:
This method decaffeinates coffee directly or indirectly without using any chemicals. This method is based on the concepts of solubility and osmosis. It is put in hot water to dissolve and collect the caffeine in the coffee beans. Caffeine, which is passed through the activated charcoal filter and dissolved into the water, is collected here. This filter allows the small fat, flavor and protein molecules dissolved in the water to pass, while preventing the caffeine molecules from passing through. Other substances (flavours, oils) dissolved in water are filtered and transferred to another water tank. In this way, only caffeine is dissolved from green coffee beans placed in water saturated with flavoring substances such as aroma, oil and protein and filtered through a filter. This water is also called GCE (Green Coffee Extract). Thus, more than 1000 components such as soluble aroma, protein, oil in green coffee beans can be preserved. This method is repeated until 99.9% of the caffeine in the coffee beans is dissolved. This process takes 8-10 hours.

Organic solvent processes:
The fact that chemical analyzers used in old decaffeination methods are harmful to health forced scientists to search for new ones. As solvents, benzene, trichloroethylene, dichloromethane and even chloroform, dichloromethane and ethyl acetate were among the solvents used.

Solvents Used Decaffeination
At low boiling point, dichloromethane selectively and directly reaches and exports caffeine. There is no harm in terms of health. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has identified it as 'low risk' to essentially non-existent. Allows up to 10 ppm (ppm = parts per million). Despite this, only 1 ppm is used on average in the coffee industry. Dichloromethane can exist at temperatures up to 40 °C. If we consider that the minimum roasting degree of coffee is 204 °C, it has no chance of existence. Ethyl acetate is the most natural of the chemicals used, it is found naturally in many foods. Coffee beans decaffeinated with ethyl acetate are labeled as Naturally Decaffeinated.

Direct Method
Steam for 30 minutes to open pores. It is then diluted with dichloromethane or ethyl acetate for about 10 hours to decaffeinate. Afterwards, the residues of the solvents in the core are rinsed and purified from the solvents by approximately the method of steaming. The ethyl acetate used here is synthetic.
Indirect Method
The coffee beans are kept in the water tank for several hours. The beans are then removed from the water and the dissolved caffeine in the water is purified with dichloromethane or ethyl acetate. The decaffeinated water in this tank will only provide the decaffeination of the green coffee beans newly put into the tank, as the remaining other solubilized components (aromas, flavors, oils, proteins, etc.) are saturated. It is labeled Water Processed (similar to Swiss Water Process).

CO2 Process
It is also known as the CO2 Method, Liquid Carbon Dioxide Method, and Supercritical Carbon Dioxide method, and technically it is defined as supercritical fluid extraction.
CO2 acts directly and only on caffeine as a precess alkaloid. The water-soaked coffee beans are placed in a closed extraction vessel. Caffeine is dissolved by forcing the green coffee beans in this container to pass through the CO2 alkaloid with a pressure of 1000 bar. Caffeine, the only dissolved substance, is transferred to another tank called the absorption chamber. In this way, green beans are free of caffeine. In the absorption chamber, the CO2 pressure is cut off, and the CO2 is decaffeinated by charcoal filters. The decaffeinated CO2 is reused for coffee beans in another tank. This method is advantageous as no harmful substances are used. It is used for large quantities of coffee beans due to costs, therefore it is used for decaffeination of commercial/commercial (low quality) coffee beans.
Triglyceride Process
Green coffee beans are placed in the hot water tank, allowing the caffeine to rise to the surface of the bean. It is then transferred to another tank with used coffee grounds and oil. The caffeine in the green coffee beans, which are kept at high temperature for a few hours, is absorbed into the oils, and the green coffee beans that are free from caffeine are transferred to another tank and dried. The oils are decaffeinated and reused for new green coffee beans.
#Stay with Coffee, Stay Healthy…