When they decaffeinate something what do they take out? How do they know it’s gone? I can’t go to sleep until I know!
Here’s a picture of a pile of caffeine. Just a fine crystalline powder. Looks like it must absorb moisture readily from the air and is thus prone to clumping.
It’s a white powder with a really bitter taste.
Edit: Ninja’d by no more than 5 seconds! Damn
Do you know what ELSE is a white powder with a really bitter taste?
Hitler.
As for “how do they know it’s gone?”:
There are a few ways to decaffeinate coffee. One common method involves the use of carbon filters. After some time, white granular detritus will be visible on the filters – that’s the caffeine.
Funny story…My former chemistry teacher had a huge bundle of caffeine wrapped up in the backseat of his car for an experiment with our class that afternoon. Coincidentally, this teacher also loved to speed on the highway. As luck would have it, he got pulled over. With a bundle of white powder in the back seat. A white powder which is almost exactly the same as cocaine chemically.
The cop sat him on the side of the road as he tested the caffeine. Obviously, since only one little molecule sets that apart from cocaine, it tested positive. Luckily for him, he was able to find some documentation that that bundle of stuff was caffeine instead of coccaine and was let off the hook.
We didn’t have time to actually do the experiment that day…And we never did it afterwards…And…past that day we never saw that bundle again…and he quit after that year…
So we still continue a conspiracy theory to this day that our Italian chemistry teacher with slicked-back hair was actually the world’s most genius drug trafficker. A trafficker so ballsy and smart that he convinced a cop that a kilo of coke was caffeine.
God I miss that man.
I once isolated caffeine in a biochem lab class.
Not really relevant or important, but I wanted to share.
And yes, it looked like a whitish powder.
caffeine and cocaine are not similar chemically. they both do start with the letter c though.
they test decaffeination by brewing some coffee and putting it in tiny cups and letting mice drink it and see if they get jumpy.
there are multiple ways of extracting the caffeine as cited above. you then know how much you get out by comparing them. if you do the process with the same conditions, scaled up, you then will see similar results; you can do tests to verify.
(emphasis added)
Erm, caffeine is only one tiny molecule itself, so it’s equally true to say that caffeine is only one molecule away from water, or cocaine is only one molecule away from chlorine gas, or whatever.
Really not very similar, even if they are both classified as alkaloids. I’m not sure off the top of my head what structural groups a chemical test for cocaine identifies, but I’m quite surprised that caffeine would trigger a positive.
Most organic chemicals, or so it seems! I remember being quite disappointed when doing my chemistry degree that the vast majority of the exotic-sounding chemicals we used ended up looking like, well, a pile of white powder. I didn’t taste many of them, for obvious reasons, but I’ll bet most of them were salty or bitter.
We did it Organic chem, wIth a Hickman still if I remember.
I believe a lot of cocaine tests don’t actually even test for cocaine. They’re testing for impurities that are byproducts of the refining process.
Why would caffeine be in a bundle? Illegal drugs come in bundles, as do foodstuffs like flour or sugar, or maybe protein powder. But in my experience, supplements, pharmaceuticals, research chemicals etc. come in jars.
They showed a jar of pure caffeine on Mythbusters when they did the Mentos & Diet Coke myth (trying to see if caffeine was a factor in the phenomenon). Adam put a spoon in the jar and pulled up a little chunk about the size of a pea, saying, “This is enough to kill you.” :eek:
Hmm, maybe a slight exaggeration. The LD[sub]50[/sub] for caffeine is about 150-200mg/kg (cite) so even at the lower end of that, an average adult male would have to eat over 10 grams, or getting on for half an ounce, to stand an even chance of dying. I’m pretty sure that would be a couple of decent-size spoonfuls, not a little chunk.
Reminds me of people saying that <something> is only one molecule away from plastic! :eek:
Margarine, is the one I heard. Snopes link.
Plastic, of course, really is one molecule away from more plastic.
i can see the linkage between the two.
Especially if you order your caffeine at a dimer.
They’re actually quite different compounds. About the only thing they have in common is that they’re plant-derived alkaloids, which basically means that they’re produced by plants, probably have a nitrogen atom somewhere, and they taste bitter.
If you paid more attention to his lectures than his cute stories you also might have learned the difference between an atom and a molecule… 