[Ade]

(as I know zero about chemistry, I have no idea which board to post this question on. Sorry if I've chosen the wrong one).

I love tea, but I drink so much that my caffeine intake must be very unhealthy. I've tried decaffeinated tea, but it just doesn't taste the same.

Recently, I read an article on the Web that said that if you steep tea in a little boiling water for 30-45 seconds, then pour away the water and make the tea as usual, you'll have removed about 80% of the caffeine. The article said that this method is especially effective with tea-bags, because the tea in them is so fine and thus has such a large surface area.

The article said that this method depends on the fact that caffeine is very soluble in water.

But a friend has cast doubt on this method: he said he saw a TV programme about decaffeinating tea, and it showed that it was a long and complicated process, so he reasons that just washing the tea leaves in boiling water before you make the tea seems too simple a method to work.

So, is this method likely to work?

[Arkcon]

There are many web sites that make the claim you've heard, that the caffeine comes off rapidly and may be discarded, but I don't know of anyone who's carefully measured the before and after.  Caffeine needs acid to dissolve it in water, so if 80% comes off first, then at least some of the acid must come with it, and that's part of the flavor of coffee and tea.

[curiouscat]

My hunch is try drinking that tea you prepare by this procedure and you'll not like it either.

Ergo, irrespective of whether caffeine is lost or not the flavor will be.

[fledarmus]

This is just another way of saying that the second cup of tea from a teabag will have less caffeine than the first. The process works, but basically you are just brewing a cup of tea, throwing it away, and brewing a second cup from the same teabag. Personally, although I have done that a number of times (particularly in the old days, when restaurants would provide you a large carafe of hot water and a single teabag if you ordered hot tea), I've never enjoyed the second cup of tea nearly as much as the first. (That being said, I've never found a cup of decaffeinated tea that I've enjoyed as much as a first cup of real tea either.)

The long complicated processes for decaffeinating tea are used precisely to avoid throwing away all the flavor you get from that first few seconds of extraction along with the caffeine. These processes are done cold using solvents that are better at dissolving the caffeine than the flavors in the tea, typically dichloromethane or supercritical carbon dioxide. The goal is not just to reduce the amount of caffeine in the tea, but to do it without reducing any of the other components of the tea.