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Geek Trivia #4

ziggy on 2003-02-05T16:11:53

My last geek trivia question was a little obscure. Here's something more mundane:

Question 1 (10pts):

What is the Swiss Water Process? Specifically, what does it do?

Question 2 (15pts):

How does it work?
As always, no searching. Good luck!

 

Update +25 points to dws!

Q1: The Swiss Water Process is a mechanism to decaffeinate coffee beans.

Q2: It works by leeching out the caffeine and essential oils from a batch of green coffee beans. Once the caffeine and oils have been leeched out, the inital batch of green beans is thrown away, and the caffeine is chemically removed from the water. Subsequent batches of green coffee beans are immersed in this water, but only the caffeine leeches out this time (the water is already saturated with the other essential oils found in coffee beans, and no more essential oils leech out). Repeat steps two and three for decaffeinating more green coffee beans.

Swiss Water Process

dws on 2003-02-05T17:33:21

My (feeble) understanding of the swiss water process is that it is a way to leech the caffiene from green coffee beans in such a way as to leave various oils and flavors untouched. I heard that the process was discovered accidentally, after cargo from a sunken ship was retrieved, and the waterlogged beans where dried out and roasted, and found to have lost their buzz-making capability, but retained their taste.

Enabling comments

dws on 2003-02-05T17:35:21

Oh, and it wasn't so much that your last quiz was hard, as that you'd forgotten to enable comments.

Re:Enabling comments

dws on 2003-02-05T17:37:44

Oop. Belay that. I seem to have found a navigation path that shows the quiz without comments enabled, though they clearly are. Hm...

Blech

belg4mit on 2003-02-06T17:43:40

What a waste, just use CO2.

Re:Blech

ziggy on 2003-02-06T18:11:11

You know, I never knew about the O2/CO2 process. Because this page lists it last among the methods to decaffeinate coffee, I guess that it is the newest process. Sounds to me like it is no more than 10-15 years old.

That page also mentions that SWP uses a charcoal filter to remove caffeine from the water. I'm not sure this description is correct, since it makes it sound like the coffee oils are reintroduced into the bean. That's the first and only time I've heard about coffee oils being reintroduced to the bean in any decaffeination process...

Re:Blech

belg4mit on 2003-02-06T19:23:22

This is the one I found (of course I was looking explicitly for CO2 decaffeination), it has a decent description of Swiss Water method.

Re:Blech

ziggy on 2003-02-06T19:39:04

Hm. I'll have to look up SWP in my library. All of the roasters, baristas and coffee snobs I've talked to for over a decade now are all under the impression that SWP needs a batch of beans to prime the water so that subsequent batches of beans only lose the caffeine.

Maybe I'm just re-circulating an urban legend here...