Hey everybody welcome back to explain that five podcast where we take the questions you always wanted to ask and talk about them in a way That's easy to understand where your hosts. I'm Tim as always. I'm Kevin So Kevin do you remember what our very first episode of your life was of course? It was about caffeine and how so magical that it gives you energy even though it has zero calories That's right and today.
We're doing Eli five on the opposite decaf So how is decaf coffee even possible isn't caffeine naturally just embedded in the coffee beans themselves? Ah, yes So there are a couple methods actually but the most popular one has a pretty interesting origin story which we can also explain Yes, we should definitely explain this one I think it's the one where they talk about how decaf was accidentally discovered when a train car got soaked by sea water is that correct? That's right. That's right the first commercially successful decaffeination process was invented by a German merchant Ludwig Rosilius in 1903 after he observed that a freight of coffee beans accidentally soaked in seawater had lost most of their caffeine content Without losing much of their flavor.
So Rosilius here. He worked out an industrial method to basically repeat that process First steaming the beans with various acids before settling on the solvent benzene to remove the caffeine That's basically how the cafe the coffee was born. Mm-hmm. It was um, it was sold under two brands Cafe HAG in most of Europe and Sanka ran coffee in France and the US and now both are worldwide brands underneath craft foods fascinating Now there was a problem though with benzene.
Yeah, so today we recognize benzene as a potential carcinogen and commercial processes today use alternative Solvents such as metylene chloride or ethyl acetate So what happens now is that the beans are first soaked in water and then covered in a solution containing either of those solvents So basically the caffeine is then drawn out by those solvents the process is repeated eight to twelve times until the caffeine content meets the required standards That allow it to be called decaffeinated. Oh, so we should talk about these standards So decaf still has some caffeine in it then it's not entirely removed. That's right actually most of the caffeine is removed But not all so how much is taken out about 97% of caffeine needs to be removed according to the US standard And actually it's 99.9% caffeine free by the EU standard and clarify that's 99.9% of the mass So soaking beans in solvent, you know, it doesn't sound too healthy Well people do talk about that but both of the agents we talked about have got a clean bill of help from the FDA So in 1985 the US's food drug administration said that the likelihood of any health risk from metylene chloride was so low as to be Essentially non-existent. Mm, but you said there were multiple methods.
Is there a better one? Oh, yeah, so there's another one It's called a Swiss water method. What happens here is that The process sees the beans against so good water and the caffeine rich solution is extracted through, you know, Solidability and osmosis and by soaking the beans in caffeine free green coffee extract Basically the caffeine is extracted from the beans and into the solution while the flavor components are retained in beans to call the Swiss water method I see there's nothing special about Swiss water itself, but this method was invented in Switzerland. I take it Yeah, yeah, that's what it got to name it first started in Switzerland in 1930s and the process was first used commercially in 1979 It gained favor because it was the first decaffeination method, you know, like you said not to use any solvents I see now finally an age-old question around coffee is does coffee make you want to go to the restroom?
Oh, man So there's a ton of discussion on this topic and correlation is actually generally generally agreed upon coffee makes you want to poop and Unfortunately, it's the reasoning. There's a lot of theories as far as explaining the kind of causal effect Some people say the reason why coffee makes you poop is because caffeine activates, you know contractions in your colon or intestinal muscles But some other people they point to research that shows that decaf coffee has nearly the same effect as caffeinated So maybe there's something else in coffee that stimulates your GI tract I've heard that also say that coffee appears to stimulate the release of the hormone gastrin which enables production of some gastric acid or something acid which might also urge Colon activity so there's a ton of reasons other interesting Did you learn something new if you did send us an email? We are at ely5thepodcast at gmail.com we love hearing from you Especially when you've got suggestions for us and future questions and topics that we should explore as always Thank you to community at par slash explainer 5 and we will see you all next week