De-clawing a caffeine addict
By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman
It seems of late I have spent more time in a hospital bed waiting for the hours to creep across the face of the clock. For a person as active as I am, the worst part of this ordeal is not the bland hospital menus, not even all the poking around by nurses, but it is the hours of boredom.
My latest hospital encounter was in the mega-hospital in Springfield. I was there for heart related issues, therefore I was assigned a bed in the cardiac ward. Stamped right on the menu selection in all capital letters was “NO CAFFEINE per MD.” Understandable in the cardiac ward where the effects of caffeine are known to aggravate several factors detrimental to heart health, including elevating blood pressure, cholesterol levels that can cause the heart to pump faster and breathing to quicken.
With my heart condition, I have learned to substitute the leaded variety of coffee for decaffeinated, so when I saw the bold warning that no caffeine would be on the daily menu, I inquired about decaf for more morning coffee. I was instructed just to write on the menu a request for decaf coffee.
Thus began a series of love letters to and from the kitchen beginning with a red ink rubber stamp across my handwritten request for decaf that repeated the “No Caffeine per MD.” I sent back a message explaining the meaning of the prefix “de” as in decaffeinated.
I pulled out all stops, explaining the word depopulation meant an area where people have left. Dehumidify meant to take away the humidity. Declaw meant to remove an animal’s claws. Delouse meant to take the lice away.
The list was endless, but the nomenclature, when it came to decaffeinated coffee, only got me a “Dear Patient” pink sticker saying: “It was necessary to change your selections in order to meet the diet prescription. Signed Dietary Dept.” Hey, folks, I wasn’t asking for eggs over easy and steak, just a cup of decaf coffee. The end results was that a patient advocate came to my bedside to explain that despite the term, not all caffeine is removed by the process, although she admitted the reason I was in the hospital wouldn’t necessarily preclude having a cup of morning decaf.
But what she said about decaf coffee not being really decaffeinated caused me to do some investigation. She was right. Not all caffeine is removed in the complicated process the lowly coffee bean goes through to give up its caffeine. Almost every process for decaffeination consists of soaking the beans in water to dissolve the caffeine, extracting the caffeine with either a solvent or activated carbon, then re-soaking the beans in decaffeinated water to reabsorb the flavor lost in the extraction.
There are three basic methods of decaffeinating coffee. The Swiss Water Process calls for green coffee beans to be soaked in hot water the remove the caffeine. The first batch of coffee beans is discarded while the caffeine in a new batch of coffee beans is stripped from the solution by means of activated carbon filter. The CO2 process calls for soaking the beans in highly compressed CO2, which extracts the caffeine and then processed using activated carbon filters. The sparkling water decaffeination process is similar to the CO2 method, but instead of removing the caffeine with activated carbon filters, the caffeine is washed from the CO2 with sparkling water in a second tank, then recyled to extract more caffeine.
Bottom line is that not all the caffeine is removed from the coffee, nor are all the flavor compounds returned or left in the decaffeinated coffee. It is still a good placebo for a coffee drinker, sending love notes to the kitchen staff as a diversion to the boredom of a hospital room. On my final day in the hospital, the kitchen still didn’t honor my written request for decaf coffee, but scribbled across my handwriting was the word “sorry.”
I was served with a cup of steaming decaf coffee on my last day of confinement on the order of my cardiologist.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)