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Bleach London Instant Coffee Super Cool Colour - Light Soft Brown Hair Dye for Blonde Hair - Vegan & PETA-Approved Semi-Permanent Direct Dye - 150 ml

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And does Stemman drink decaffeinated himself? “Generally, no, if I don’t want the caffeine, well I just won’t have a coffee or a tea.” Chris Stemman, the executive director of the British Coffee Association, says most of those techniques from decaffeination’s earliest days are still being used today. But the process isn’t as straightforward as you’d expect. Stemman says that as people have become more used to quality coffee – for instance, the UK now boasts some 24,000 coffee shops – this has forced coffee-making companies to find ways of enhancing flavour even in decaffeinated instant coffee. The beans are first soaked in water and then covered in a solution containing either of these solvents. The caffeine is then drawn out by the solvent.

The centenary of decaffeination – 2006 – went by with little in the way of public fanfare. In the UK at least, the number of people stumping for a decaff coffee has fallen markedly even as the quality has improved – while as many as 15% of coffee drinkers chose decaffeinated brews in the 1980s, that’s fallen to about 8% today. Decaffeination can be a complicated piece of chemistry, which is why there are these very sophisticated companies doing it.”

If you’re partial to a cup of coffee minus the caffeine, then next time you’ve boiled the kettle you should raise your mug in memory of Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge. And there’s another thing. While each of these methods will take most of the caffeine away, there’s no such thing as a completely decaffeinated drink. If you really want to avoid any caffeine at all, it’s probably better to drink something that never had a trace of it in the first place. Could caffeine be removed from coffee? The answer, as any supermarket aisle will tell you, is yes – but the process isn’t as simple as you might think. Benzene, it turned out, was a possible carcinogen, so the search was on for new techniques that could prise out the caffeine from the beans – and yet leave the flavour intact. Goethe had been recently given a case of coffee beans, and so he asked Runge to perform an analysis of the beans. What Runge discovered is arguably the most consumed drug in the modern world – caffeine.

The first person to hit upon a practical decaffeination method was another German, Ludwig Roselius, the head of the coffee company Kaffee HAG. Roselius discovered the secret to decaffeination by accident. In 1903, shipment of coffee had been swamped by seawater in transit – leaching out the caffeine but not the flavour. Roselius worked out an industrial method to repeat it, steaming the beans with various acids before using the solvent benzene to remove the caffeine. Decaffeinated coffee was born. Decaffeination became much more widespread as instant coffee became a staple, says Stemman. But the early incarnations of instant decaff coffee were not a roaring success. Runge was a 19th-Century German chemist who had come to the attention of Goethe – the poet and statesman who was also a keen science scholar. Goethe had heard of Runge’s groundbreaking investigation into belladonna, otherwise known as nightshade. Runge had isolated the compound that caused eye muscles to dilate if it was ingested.

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