Coffee – Decaf, Good or Bad?
Recently a variety of the coffee tree was discovered that naturally contains almost no caffeine. Until and unless that species finds its way into commercial production, we’re left with the current methods for removing unwanted caffeine from coffee. But how do those methods affect the taste of our java?
If processed and prepared well, studies have proven that there is very little difference in the taste of regular coffee and decaffeinated coffee. What is the decaffeinating process?
One necessary step for removing caffeine is exposing the coffee beans to hot water and then passing them through methylene chloride.
Maybe you didn’t know your coffee had already seen water before you got to it? In fact, several times. The berries are rinsed after picking to soften the outer fruit for removal, then rinsed again to help eliminate the remaining flesh.
The beans are then washed thoroughly then soaked in methylene chloride. Most people are unaware how much exposure to water their coffee has had before they receive it.
Because of the processing that the coffee beans go through at times the taste may be altered a bit. It may be more due to the process than the lack of caffeine that makes you notice a difference in the flavor.
To decaffeinate the beans using chemicals they must first be steamed to open up the pores of the beans. This allows the caffeine to be pulled from the bean when soaked in methylene chloride.
Alternatively, the beans can be soaked for several hours in hot water, where the caffeine leaches out into the bath. The beans are removed and methylene chloride introduced to the bath. There it bonds with the caffeine, not the flavored components that have washed out of the bean. The beans are then soaked again where they reabsorb the flavor compounds.
An entirely different process, called the Swiss method, also soaks the beans in hot water for several hours, but no methylene chloride is used. Instead the caffeine is removed by filtering the water through activated charcoal. More or less pure carbon, the molecular structure of activated charcoal has been altered to provide a large surface area for other molecules to stick to.
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