heasliponline01
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Extracting caffeine out of tea leaves
Thought about extracting caffeine out of tea leaves and also trying to figure out how much quantity contains various types of tea, so I boiled the tea
leaves in a beaker and afterwards filtered the tea liquid, added lead acetate until solution was cleared. After repeating the process, I added
chloroform but I wasn't able to separate the caffeine, I feel like I got lost somewhere in the middle of the process.
Can someone advice me on this?
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Texium
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Maybe you could check this out:
http://chem-courses.ucsd.edu/CoursePages/Uglabs/143A_Weizman...
It's a slightly different method. It doesn't require lead acetate for one thing, and has nice colorful step-by-step pictures along with a ton of
information. It's also the first thing that comes up on Google when you search for "extracting caffeine from tea," so learn to use the Google.
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blazeriggins127
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Quote: Originally posted by heasliponline01  | Thought about extracting caffeine out of tea leaves and also trying to figure out how much quantity contains various types of tea, so I boiled the tea
leaves in a beaker and afterwards filtered the tea liquid, added lead acetate until solution was cleared. After repeating the process, I added
chloroform but I wasn't able to separate the caffeine, I feel like I got lost somewhere in the middle of the process.
Can someone advice me on this? |
I also did this some time ago, and I think that you were close to obtain the desired result but your experiment wasn't quite accurate- or perhaps your
forum post was quite short and you didn't bother to write exactly the quantities you added, because you have to add a right amount of chloroform for
example in order to separate the caffeine. Also, you should know that various kind of teas have more or less amount of caffeine inside. Other factors
are the boling temperature. Also, if you are looking to extract the caffeine out of various other products such as coffee, then you should use
different type of procedure. Also, make sure that you don't lose most of the cafeine during the evaporation process. I guess you already know that the
result might not be pure caffeine anyway, but will most posibly contain tea residues as well.
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