Amount Of Caffeine In Gourmet Coffee

It is no secret that an industry catering to beverages is a huge money making enterprise. This, of course, includes coffee. However, no matter what the beverages are, such as teas, bottled water and sodas, there is one main ingredient that gets most of the marketing attention and that is caffeine.

Of course, coffee is one of these major beverages and just like bottled water, sodas and teas, they are all marketed around at least one main ingredient; caffeine.

Normally, a beverage is considered caffeine free only if it never contained caffeine from the start. Of course, this would rule out the tea leaves and coffee beans since they both have too much caffeine in their unprocessed, natural form.

Obviously, if you really cannot do without your daily cups of gourmet coffee or tea, yet you do not want any caffeine in either, then you need to check out how much caffeine occurs naturally in the various coffees and teas. Some have too much caffeine and others have less. You should also understand the actual process that is used to remove the caffeine from a specific product.

Even in this day of modern technology there is no way that any method can completely remove all caffeine content from a product. In the United States there is no “law” about removing caffeine but the standard indicates a beverage can be sold as decaffeinated if 97% of it is removed.

In Europe, they have a higher standard that indicates it can be termed decaffeinated if 99% of the caffeine is removed. There are certain things that affect the content of caffeine that are actually out of the manufacturers control and that includes the steeping times and methods of brewing, which both drastically impact the amount of caffeine that you end up drinking.

If you were to do an internet search about how the decaffeinated process work, then you might find some interesting things, such as conflicting, different, misleading or just plain confusing results.

One reason for this is because of the amount of money that consumers spend on these beverages. It is so much that manufacturers do not want to take any chances of losing that revenue. So, they do anything they can to be sure that consumers continue to purchase their coffee products.

Try doing a little of your own research on the methods that are used to extract the caffeine content from common beverages and you are very likely to be a lot choosier with your next purchase.