Removing caffeine from tea, but not the flavor

Has anyone tried this? All you need to do is get hot water ready for steeping your tea, like normal, but make a little extra. Steep the tea leaves for approximately 20 seconds in the hot water and then remove the tea and pour out the water.
Then, refill the tea cup or tea pot with hot water again and steep as normal.
We learned that caffeine in the tea leaves is one of the first things to steep out into the water, because it is so water soluable. Basically, the majority of the caffeine is removed from the tea leaves and goes into the water within the first 20 seconds of steeping.
Therefore, if you throw out this water you throw out the majority of the caffeine, and naturally and quickly decaffeinate your tea.
Plus, you might wonder if this removes any of the flavor from the tea? The 20 second time period is just too short to remove the flavor from the tea, most of which hasn’t steeped into the water at that point.

So, the next time you want a soothing cup of hot tea right before bed, try this trick and you will not be kept up all night from the caffeine, but instead can relax and unwind before bed.

11 Replies
AllanK said

Unfortunately you are completely wrong. There was a thread about this a while back. A scientist tested this theory using scientific methods. He found that you had to steep the tea for something like 12 minutes to remove 90% of the caffeine and that a thirty second steep barely removed any caffeine. Where do you get your information from, this is totally false.

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This is an extremely annoying post. Anyone reading it and not disbelieving every single word will come away dumber than if they had never seen it.

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Brian said

i was gonna say….if that was true then by the second rinse while drinking Pu’erh, it would have no caffiene. aand i can def say that my Pu still has caffiene. i can feel it. :-P

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Thanks guys for your comments! This wasn’t my idea but I had seen it somewhere in my research and knew the Steepster community would let me know true or false. I thought it was pretty crazy!

AllanK said

This myth about decaffeinating tea has been going around for a while now. You are hardly the first to suggest it.

Any other tips that have been proven, you would like to share?

AllanK said

Yeah, only if you want decaf you have to buy decaf, Simpson and Vail sells some good ones, www.svtea.com.

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AllanK said

Interesting article. It says approximately the same thing that was in another scientific study that was mentioned on an older Steepster thread, I don’t remember which one. Another myth is that White Tea has the least caffeine, followed by green tea, then black. I wish I could remember the link but this study showed that white tea could just as easily be very high in caffeine, higher than black in some cases.

Wocket said

I find http://ratetea.com/topic/caffeine-content-of-tea/21/
to be a fairly useful resource for these sorts of questions. Particularly interesting in that leaves closers to the bud have more caffeine, which would tend to indicate most high-end whites and greens are likely to be higher by weight.

Edit: Footnote 4 is a link to what is either the study in question, or a similar effort, in .pdf format. Quite technical.

AllanK said

In general, buds have the most caffeine, followed by small leaves, followed by large leaves, with stems and tea flowers having the least caffeine. I believe tea flowers to be so low in caffeine that they can be considered decaf effectively.

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