Decaffeination is the act of extracting caffeine from coffee beans, mate, cocoa, tea leaves and other caffeine-containing materials. Coffee can be decaffeinated with the help of a variety of decaffeination processes, in which most would be harmless to the health, but would harm the coffee quality.
All of the various processes, involves the soaking of beans in water in order to dissolve the caffeine, extract the caffeine with either a solvent or activated carbon, and then again re-soak the coffee beans in the decaffeinated water to reabsorb the flavor compounds that were lost in the initial extraction. This process is repeated anywhere from 8 to 12 times until it meets either the international standard of having removed 97% of the caffeine in the beans or the EU standard of having the beans 99.9% caffeine free by mass. C |
