How caffeine is made

Decaf makers do not throw the caffeine away. They recover it and sell it to soft drink companies.

stations: 7
things upstream: 10
raw sources: 7
steps from the ground: 4

The short version

Bags of white caffeine powder come from two places. Decaf plants pull it out of green coffee beans with water, solvent or carbon dioxide, ending with a crude product about 85% caffeine that still needs purifying. Chemical plants, with China the leading producer, build it through a long chain of reactions, then refine, crystallize, dry and mill it.

Steam the green beans

Unroasted coffee beans are steamed or soaked before anything else happens. The extraction has to come before roasting, while the flavor precursors are still intact in the bean.

Goes in
Coffee cherries
Flush with carbon dioxide

Carbon dioxide under supercritical conditions is forced through the beans and carries the alkaloid out. Other plants rinse with an organic solvent, or soak in water and treat the water.

Goes in
Carbon dioxide
Strip it from the carrier

The caffeine is separated from whatever carried it. With an organic solvent, simple evaporation leaves it behind. Decaf plants treat this crude material as a second product to sell.
Purify the crude

Crude caffeine from decaffeination is only about 85% caffeine, too impure for food or medicine. One patented process dissolves it in water, treats and filters the solution to take out impurities, and lets clean crystals form.
Or build it from scratch

Chemical plants also make caffeine with no coffee or tea involved. The main industrial route runs simple feedstocks through a long chain of reactions and filtering steps to a related compound, theophylline, and then to crude caffeine. A patent complains that the route is long and produces plenty of wastewater.
Refine, dry and mill

Synthetic crude is refined, crystallized, filtered and dried, then granulated and pulverized into white powder. In its pure anhydrous form it melts at 235 to 238 °C.
Sell it onward

The powder is sold in USP, EP and FCC grades for food and medicine, generally at 99% purity or above. One market report puts beverages at 55% to 65% of demand and pharmaceuticals at 15% to 25%.

End of the lineCaffeine Next it goes into energy drink.

Worth repeating

The first commercial decaffeination process came about in 1903, after a shipment of coffee soaked in sea water turned out to have lost most of its caffeine.
A 12-ounce glass of cola holds about 40 mg of caffeine, against about 100 mg in an average cup of coffee.
Plants evolved caffeine separately in different species, an example of convergent evolution.