Extracting caffeine from coffee

We will be extracting some caffeine from coffee today! I used regular coffee grounds, but I think the process is actually faster and easier with instant coffee.

In theory the yield should have been hovering around 300mg if ALL the caffeine was removed. However, I got around 10% of that (30mg). Apparently 10g makes about a cup of coffee, so a yield of 30mg isn't that horrible.

Industrially, the caffeine is made synthetically and not extracted because it isn't really economical. The only time caffeine is extracted is for making decaffeinated coffee. But in that case, the end product is the coffee itself and the caffeine is a by-product. It is just much cheaper to make the caffeine directly.

Ill be doing a future video on how to get caffeine from caffeine pills.

I am lazy and it is getting there. I have been spending most of my time focusing on filming new experiments, so I often forget about the other things.

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[louiseahimsa]

this is more entertaining when you dont have to write a post lab report after watching it

[luckyvaun]

This is exactly how I make my coffee every morning.

[gralteindauphinois]

Using a coffee filter for its original purpose. How ironic coming from a chemist

[im]

Two points I gotta make: Don't be afraid to use extra water for the coffee bean extraction- you can always reduce down by boiling (caffeine is pretty hard to burn, you'd have to get it past 235C to even think about it). Also I feel like drying the DCM was largely unnecessary and even harmful (the salt water likely stole a significant portion of your yield). Since you are drying your solvent with heat, why worry about having an anhydrous solution?

[skyclaw]

In an unprecedented turn of events, Nile uses a coffee filter to filter coffee.

[zhanchi]

You can boil the coffee in sulfuric acid (to free it from it's acid-bound form), make it slightly basic with NaOH and extract it with chloroform instead of DCM (both work fine probably). We used that method at uni.

[nickeman]

My thesis is literally about extracting caffeine from coffee and this suddenly came up in my recommended. Thank you YouTube

[MacheteEnima]

Do your neighbors just think your cooking meth?

[daveh]

Did this at school in the 1960s but used a large catering can of Nescafe instant coffee. Got quite a lot of caffeine yeild out of it which went very well with the moonshine alcohol made from fermented and distilled sugar and yeast. Hell of a party that weekend.

[apexshinbi]

Alternative title: “How to scam your coke customers”

[artiefufkin]

Neat to see these early videos when he's still working on his eventual catchphrase, "Honestly, the yield is pretty bad, but I still have more *blank than I need."

[JohnDlugosz]

"Do you want milk or sugar?" "No, just come sodium carbonate. It really brings out more flavor."

[Olivia-swji]

Extracting nicotine from cigarettes please!!!

[Constitution]

Chemistry is fascinating. The entire time I was wondering whether the dichloromethane would be removed, and if so, how. In the end, he just heated it up because dichloromethane has a low boiling point. Fascinating that it's possible to do all this mixing and removing!!!

[Dee_Just_Dee]

Years ago, my brother bought a 1 kg tub of pure anhydrous caffeine so that we could caffeinate just about anything we chose to drink. This experiment gives me a special appreciation for the processing that went into that.

[batubulgur]

I am begging you man. Please upload more frequenly. I couldn't find anyother youtuber like you. Your vids are neat, professional, educational and not sloppy like many other channels. Please upload more frequently. I love your vids. Keep up the good work

[The-Floor.]

Copy paste

Put in 10g of coffee into a container followed by 4g of sodium carbonate, then add in 60mL of distilled water (increase amount of ingredients for larger quantities), and then bring the solution to boil for 15 minutes, stir or shake occasionally to prevent it from foaming over, or turn down the heat to simmer, once the 15 minutes is over you can let it cool but make sure to keep the temp as high as possible, and then strain it in a coffee filter, and then add 100mL of boiling distilled water, then pour the mixture into a separatory funnel and then add 15mL of dichloromethane, and gently shake it around, after that pour out the DCM which has the caffeine in it, and repeat the process with the remaining coffee, and then pour the DCM into a clean separatory funnel along with a saturated salt solution to pull water from the solvent, and then gently shake it again before pouring out the DCM, and add in drying agents like molecular sieves and dry for 20 minutes before placing it into a new beaker, and the boil to remove the DCM, but don't overheat it as it will burn, and then, once dry, recrystallize the remaining substance with a 95% ethanol solution, and then let to rest in the freezer before vaccum filtering and letting it dry in the vaccum for a few minutes.

[justaguy]

First half of extraction is basically making coffee

[alams]

0:29

This is opposite of clickbait... you are straight away telling the audience that this video is almost same as other one...

That's why I love this channel... I am still gonna watch it... 😋😋😋😋😋

[PyroOverflow]

Nice video! One thing you might want to look into is to simply grind finer. In the coffee community the consensus seem to be that after a certain size only the exterior gets extracted - that could explain the low caffeine yield.