What do you think of this fact?
Decaf sounds like a modern invention for people who want a latte at midnight. In fact it goes back more than 100 years, and, if the story is right, to a shipping accident.
First, Goethe wanted answers
Before anyone could remove caffeine, someone had to find it. According to Lavazza, the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge a box of coffee beans in 1819 and asked him to find out why coffee kept him awake. In 1820 Runge isolated caffeine. He did not turn it into a product, though.
The soggy shipment
That came about 85 years later. Ludwig Roselius, a coffee merchant from Bremen, was the man behind it. As the story goes, a shipment of his beans got soaked in seawater in transit. The wet beans had lost much of their caffeine.
The sources disagree on the taste: some say the flavor barely changed apart from a slight saltiness, while Lavazza says it was affected. Either way, Roselius saw the idea behind it. His process steamed the beans, treated them with salt water and then used benzene as a solvent to pull out the remaining caffeine. Benzene is no longer used today. The dates vary slightly between sources, but around 1905 and 1906 he patented the method.
A brand with a lifebuoy
Roselius sold his coffee through the Kaffee-Handels-Aktiengesellschaft, better known by its short name Kaffee HAG. It was also sold under the brand name Sanka, from the French „sans caféine“, meaning „without caffeine“.
Bonus fact: The famous lifebuoy logo of Kaffee HAG was designed by Alfred Runge and Eduard Scotland. So the decaf story has two Runges: one found caffeine, one designed the logo of the coffee without it.
Modern decaf works differently. Barista Magazine describes the Swiss Water Process, piloted in 1985, which uses water and activated carbon filters instead of benzene.
So the cup that lets you sleep began with a poet who could not, and a box of beans that went for an unplanned swim.