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by vikingerik 52 days ago
FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.
1 comments

> Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup

Do you have a source for this? Because it doesn't sound right to me. And also, I live in a coffee producing company, work adjacent to the coffee industry, and had a long conversation with someone planning to set up a business exporting green beans to the US, and their beans were getting tested to an extreme degree and being rejected for a few ppm over on certain things.

I have heard the 3% rule but fyi it's 1% in the EU and since there's actually not that many large scale decaffeination factories in the world, as far as I know they all target the EU level.

If you buy small batch, large batch, or somewhere in between it's probably been processed in one of these few large factories.

Just Wikipedia. It cites two studies that found values of 8-13 mg and 3-32 mg per decaf cup, compared to regular which is 95-200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination
The linked Wikipedia "study" is this science daily article:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061012185602.h...

And that article links back to this UFL press release. I've clicked every link I can find and there's not an actual, published study to be found anywhere:

https://archive.news.ufl.edu/articles/2006/10/uf-experts-dec...

But even if there was, is a study from 20 years ago still relevant?