How To Decaffeinate Your Tea {Quick Tip}

This is a quick tip about how to decaffeinate your tea yourself, at home, easily, quickly, and naturally, that I learned while working in a tea room in college.

Whenever someone would order caffeine free hot tea while I worked at the tea room we would not use a special tea that was already decaffeinated, but would remove the caffeine ourselves, naturally, while preparing the drink.

All you need to do is get hot water ready for steeping your tea, like normal, but make a little extra. Steep the tea leaves (either in a tea bag or a tea ball if you have loose tea, as we used) for approximately 20 seconds in the hot water and then remove the tea and pour out the water.

Then, refill the tea cup or tea pot with hot water again and steep as normal.

I asked how it worked, and I was told that the caffeine in the tea leaves is one of the first things to steep out into the water, because it is so water soluable. Basically, the majority of the caffeine is removed from the tea leaves and goes into the water within the first 20 seconds of steeping.

Therefore, if you throw out this water you throw out the majority of the caffeine, and naturally and quickly decaffeinate your tea.

This method will not completely remove every trace of caffeine from your tea, but generally neither do other decaffeination methods.

Plus, you might wonder if this removes any of the flavor from the tea. In my experience, no, based on several taste tests we did in the kitchen of the tea room. The 20 second time period is just too short to remove the flavor from the tea, most of which hasn't steeped into the water at that point.

So, the next time you want a soothing cup of hot tea right before bed, try this trick and you will not be kept up all night from the caffeine, but instead can relax and unwind before bed. I love doing it myself!

Photo courtesy of Selma90

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