Swiss Water Process
When I was in college I stopped drinking caffeinated sodas and coffee. I quit for many reasons, but basically I was very addicted and it was making me moody as I would peak and crash throughout the day depending on my soda consumption. I have always loved the flavor of coffee so I switched to decaf when I moved off caffeine. I’m aware that I’m not 100% caffeine free as decaf does contain some smaller amounts of caffeine and I’m also hopelessly addicted to chocolate (who isn’t?) which also contains caffeine, so please don’t write in to tell me I’m a hypocrite.
Speaking of hypocritical, drinking coffee is not green no matter how much shade grown, fair trade beans you buy, as we literally live thousands of miles away from the proper climate to grow it. However, in our efforts to be better we are looking at ways to reduce the problems associated with coffee. Stephanie has started buying all organic free-trade coffee, but there are less options with decaf.
I recently started noticing coffee decaffeinated using the Swiss Water Process which piqued my interest to look into how it works and what it actually is. If you’re not aware of the current process for decaffeination it’s done using many different methods. They all basically put the beans in a mixture that leeches the caffeine out of the beans and into the mixture instead. Then the caffeine is removed from the mixture and the process is repeated. However, the main difference is that most systems use chemicals to remove the caffeine and the Swiss Water Process uses only water to remove the caffeine.
The process is organic since it doesn’t use any chemicals and they can control it to guarantee their coffees are 99.9% caffeine free, but I wonder how green it really is if you look at the entire process. The beans can only be processed at their plant in Vancouver, Canada. So for the “local” coffee we bought that was treated with the Swiss Water Process in Kona, Hawaii. The beans had to travel to Vancouver, be treated with the process which requires water and electricity and then be shipped back to Kona, roasted and packaged for us at the farm to purchase as a local food item directly from the farmer. That doesn’t feel very green or sustainable. And I definately don’t believe it should able to be labelled as local. Is that greener or better than using coffee that was processed closer using a chemical process? I think we can have more of a greener impact on our coffee by insuring that it’s fair trade and organically grown, but the coffee does taste really good when it was decaffeinated using the Swiss Water process. Either way I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up coffee yet!
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Going Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Interesting post – we just voted with our CSA on whether people want to have the option to buy sustainable fair trade coffee from a local supplier (obviously not locally grown) through the CSA. I voted yes – parenthood has made me a coffee addict! Though I agree with you about the crashing – I really feel it and it's not good. Maybe you should try puer tea – I think it's the tea of choice for coffee lovers who want a decaf option (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-erh_tea). It brews really dark and it's pretty bitter. Min and I picked some up in China and we love it.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Interesting post – we just voted with our CSA on whether people want to have the option to buy sustainable fair trade coffee from a local supplier (obviously not locally grown) through the CSA. I voted yes – parenthood has made me a coffee addict! Though I agree with you about the crashing – I really feel it and it's not good. Maybe you should try puer tea – I think it's the tea of choice for coffee lovers who want a decaf option (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-erh_tea). It brews really dark and it's pretty bitter. Min and I picked some up in China and we love it.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Thanks for the link, those giant tea cakes look pretty interesting. I didn't know you can age some types of tea like wine. Does Pu-erh tea have some caffeine, just not as much as regular coffee or is it completely caffeine free?
Our CSA just started offering conscious coffee (http://www.consciouscoffees.com) to it's members in both a direct buy and CSA. We wanted to do the CSA, but we need to alternate both regular and decaf and there wasn't a way to do it. Hopefully, we'll buy some this summer and try it out.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Something else to consider is the amount of water they have to use during the Swiss Water Process. This is the first I've heard about it, and I never knew how they made decaffinated coffee, but it seems like it could take a lot of water to thoroughly remove caffine from the beans. Though, I would guess that even large amounts of water use would probably be more environmentally friendly than large amounts of chemicals.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
FYI the decaffeination process I am most familiar with (from my ChemE education), and that is used by several companies for tea and coffee, uses super critical CO2. I think the Swiss Water Process people are giving some false advertising and lumping the CO2 extraction in with all the "chemical" methods. While methylene chloride, another caffeine extraction option, is a nasty chemical, I think CO2 is just as safe as the Swiss Water process. So in case you need more options for decaf coffee vendors look and see if they use super critical CO2.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Angie, totally agree, I think that the water is reused based on the video. They use a carbon filter to grab the caffeine and then cycle the water through it. I'm sure a large amount of water is used for the entire decaf process which definitely makes it less green, but I'm not sure what the numbers are on that.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Woah, you just went too smart on me
. What's the super critical C02 process?
I'm sure they are promoting it as green as positioning, just like Monsanto is green according to their ads, but appreciate that there might be another process that's just as green.
June 12th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Basically super critical CO2 is highly selective for caffeine (no proteins or carbohydrates, which give coffee its flavor, are extracted). The caffeine is absorbed into the CO2, removed from the bean and passed out of the reactor. Best of all the CO2 (and caffeine) can be recycled.
As to Amy's point about the volume of water that must be used for the Swiss Water Process, my guess is that it is HUGE. The process sounds like it is just a batch dialysis with water as your dialysis buffer. Usually for dialysis you will uses 50-100x excess dialysis buffer compared to the volume of sample, which in the case of the Swiss Water Process is coffee.
So my 2cents is go with super critical CO2 decaf coffee, my guess is that it is the "greener" option.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:00 am
I think Puer is caffeine free, but there might be a little. It's green tea which is caffeinated, but it's steamed before it's aged and I think the steaming takes the caffeine out of it (much like making decaf coffee). I saw an episode of Alton Brown about decaf coffee and he said good decaf should be a lot more expensive than regular coffee because if they want to make it taste good they have to use the very best beans since they're basically pre-brewed.
This post was timely because this morning I drank a cup of coffee out of big mug and I finished it (which I almost never do) and I had the absolute worst caffeine overdose for 4 hours this morning – it was horrible. I was vomiting and had an awful headache and my vision was totally messed up. It was crazy. I think I need to lay off the caffeine too. I also make coffee in a french press so I think it's stronger than drip.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Ep 114: The Science of Coffee says:[...] the process does not seem very energy efficient. Presumably, a lot of water is also used. There are various online debates as to whether this is the most sustainable process for coffee [...]