Where does Decaf coffee come from?
Decaf coffee comes from Bremen, Germany. In the early 1900s the Bremen coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius developed the first commercially successful way to take the caffeine out of coffee beans, and his caffeine-free coffee was soon sold across Europe and in America.
A coffee merchant's son
Caffeine was discovered long before decaf. In 1820 the German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge isolated it from coffee beans at the request of the poet Goethe, but he never tried to make caffeine-free coffee. Ludwig Roselius was born in Bremen in 1874, the son of a coffee importer. After an apprenticeship with a grocer and coffee roaster in Hanover, he joined his father's firm, Roselius & Co., and improved its roasting. In 1902, after his father's death, he took the business over with his brother.
Beans soaked in seawater
In 1903, the usual account goes, seawater soaked a shipment of coffee beans, which lost most of their caffeine but little of their flavour. Roselius and his co-workers, among them the chemist Karl Wimmer, made this an industrial method: they steamed green beans with acids or bases, then washed out the caffeine with the solvent benzene. It was patented in 1906, when Roselius also founded a Bremen company to sell the coffee. From 1911 it was exported within Europe, to Russia and to the United States.
Why people think of Switzerland
One famous decaf method carries Switzerland's name. The Swiss Water process uses no chemical solvents: beans are soaked in water, and the caffeine is filtered out of that water. It was first developed in Switzerland in the 1930s, but it reached the market only around 1980, more than seventy years after Roselius. Most decaf is still made from green, unroasted beans, as his was, though benzene has long been replaced by other solvents. Decaf's 100th birthday, in 2006, passed with little fanfare.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Decaffeination ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Ludwig Roselius ↗ · deutsche-biographie.de ↗ · bbc.com ↗ · de.wikipedia.org ↗
