The perfect cup of tea

[bloodline]

ok, this is what we used to do at uni:

1. place Tea bag, as manny as possible, in to a large beaker.
2. Cover with boiling water.
3. Stir... Stir... keep stirring.
4. decant "tea" into a separating funnel.
5. Add 200ml of Chloroform.
6. shake.
7. remove aqueous layer, and then wash that layer again.
8, put the organic layer into an evapourating bulb.

(collect the organic layers of several washings into a single bulb).

attach bulb to the Rotary Evap, and remove Chloroform.

Scrape out the white crystaline residue, crush up with a pestle and mortar... using a rolled up peice of paper, inhale white powered through nose.

Shreek in pain... experience the Caffine rush... feel very sick and go for a lie down.

[bloodline]

mikeymike wrote:
Very odd how 'chloroform' was the first word I read of your post :-)

You've been thinking too much about the various Monkey Island drink spiking references :-)

Hheheehe, Well I think you can use any organic (non polar) solvent to extract the caffine, but Chloroform was the one we used.

It worked rather well, there are a couple of hundread mg of caffine in a single tea bag (only a tiny proportion of this actually comes out in the "brew" though :-( ).

And it's always more fun to make your own druqs, especially when they are perfectly legal.

Disclaimers, I to not recomend that any of you use my Caffine extraction method... or you may have similar symptoms to Guybrush on Blood island... only more permanent! :-o

[bloodline]

JaXanim wrote:
I read somewhere that snorting caffine extracted from tea bags may cause holes to appear in the brain. Hmmm...

JaX

PS: Omit the preliminary aqueous extraction (known as 'the brew'). Caffine is not very water soluble, so you'll get more out by running a Soxholet extraction with chloroform (or whatever) directly on the tea bags.

Holes in the brain ;-)


Well, there was no other way of getting the caffine out og the tea leaves, other than brewing it first.

Washing the tea leaves with chloroform (even when heated) is ineffective.

[bloodline]

JaXanim wrote:
@bloodline

Ah, so the caffine is probably released from a more complex molecule by hydrolysis during the brew stage. This suggests you may prefer to let the brew become a 'stew'. In our neck of the woods, 'stewed' tea is revoltingly over-brewed tea and is more or less black when observed in the cup.

The taste of stewed tea is also revolting and may be related to a very high caffine content. Good for use in the next stage before the final snort process.

JaX

That's what I though. When I said brew, I meant stew... you just leave it until you're pretty sure nothing more can come out.

The taste of caffine is very distinctive. it's extremely bitter... that probably contributes to the "revolting" taste :-)