Taking the caffeine out of Redbull so I can drink it at night

I've been wanting red bull to come out with a caffeine free version. I too love the taste of it and there's nothing that even comes close to redbull.

Mark Robertson

You can probably do an acid/alkali extraction to get JUST the caffeine... the pKb of caffeine is around 10, so working with HCl, NaOH, and some litmus paper, you can probably drop everything on one side or the other out first, without altering the chemistry (much)

Jeff Evarts

Hm, I don't know what happened to my comment on the YT video. I was suggesting freeze-drying the syrup, and then performing a supercritical CO2 extraction. It may give you better results (or worse, not sure - one way to find out) :)

Silviu T

They are, but they're so friggin useful. I bet if you keep an eye on some university surplus sites one will come up. That or a go-fund-me kind of thing; I think the patreon crowd could come up with a down payment for a $10k eppendorf.

Isaac Roll

activated carbon would grab just about everything that he wants to keep, but a more discriminating solid-phase extraction sorbent... NileRed, do you ever do SPE?

Isaac Roll

I'm pretty sure that they just don't add caffeine to caffeine-free coke. And with coffee, they use supercritical CO2 for the extraction, and are extracting from the solid coffee grounds, so it's a little different.

Isaac Roll

In the video you made the comment that DCM likes to create emulsions so much so that it could take days for it to separate. If there was a chance that a better mixture with the DCM could have pulled out more caffeine, but that meant you had to wait days, why not try that and just wait? I suppose you do risk it developing mold or something dangerous though...?

That's exactly what I was thinking too. It would probably separate all the DCM in less than 10 minutes if you spin it fast enough. But centrifuges are expensive.

Kevin Faccenda

Indeed, the fact that it is a smell means it is volatile and could easily have been lost while evaporating the bulk of the water.

Kevin Martin

If you have a centrifuge, maybe that could help break the emulsion faster.

Well done edible chem video that you made. I like the taste of Red bulls but all that caffeine is not good for my heart. I had to give it up.

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

Will you try some other methods to remove caffeine, like activated carbon or some indirect extractions?

Keith

Things are slowly getting better, but itll be a long time before it's all "normal". That's for sure

Nile Red

I never tried that because I dont have any chloroform. It degrades over time and DCM can replace it for most things. That might have helped/worked though

Nile Red

The emulsion is probably a 1000x more efficient. The surface area difference is crazy if you really shake it like crazy. If i had a large centrifuge or something, it might work to break the emulsion and it would be worth doing.

Nile Red

Awesome vid. Hope things are calming down in Quebec for you guys. Please take care.

Chris WIRVIN

then you will also need to extract the Enzymes and the theobromine, making even more work.

I loved the video! Did you mind adding some chloroform to the seperatory funnel to increase the density of the dcm? Thus it would may be easier to get rid of the emulsion.

NIce TLC . . .what solvent did you use for the development?

Also you should have carbonated the water separately then added the carbonated water to the syrup

I think the smell left with the vaccum

lol I like your username

Nile Red

I thought about that and drying it completely might have the same issue. A lot of the caffeine might still be in the acidic form and be unextractable. I also worried that it would become a miserable syrup goo mess that would be a pain to work with. Also, yeah, this video is mostly just something I wanted to try. I dont actually plan to drink it regularly, lol.

Nile Red

I thought about that, but I think it still has the same issue. The CO2 also probably cant dissolve the caffeine if its too acidic. I could be wrong though.

Nile Red

haha I actually kind of wanted to do that. That would be funny

Nile Red

Time for a Xover episode. Diamond Red Bull.

Joseph Chang

Another great, fun, interesting video! Did you reach the maximum of what you could do with the DCM, though? Since you couldn’t shake it, isn’t there more that could have been captured by repeating the back and forth technique, say twice as much? How would this differ from just shaking and dealing with the emulsion? I imagine it wouldn’t be enough to get all of it, though. (Obviously asking this as someone with minimal chemistry knowledge 🙃) One minor editing nitpick: at 3:28, you say “less than or equal” but show just “<“

Tyler Wolfe

Luckily, Coca-Cola already sells caffeine-free versions. Hooray for Coca-Cola fans!

This would be a good video for me to point out rutecarpine. I'm not sure how solid this info is, but it's supposed help your body clear caffeine quickly. It's something I recently discovered so I don't have any experience with it yet.

You could have used an enzyme to react the caffeine to one of theobromine / 1,3,7-trimethylurate / 1,7-dimethylxanthine, see the reactions at https://www.rhea-db.org/searchresults?q=CHEBI:27732. But these are probably not available, and the reactions also need other reactants, as you can see.

Decaffeinated Red Bull using supercritical CO2 maybe?

Loved the video, even if you don't achieve the goal as you intended, all attempts give you some future experience, so they are very valuable . Maybe getting rid of water from the redbull by drying the drink completely to powder and then tossing it into dcm would increase caffeine concentration in dcm? Can't imagine you doing it on a regular basis just to drink RB before going to bed lol. I like your melting point machine, you'll definitely use it often.

Marta

"I just like the weird chemical taste that they have". 😂 Best line of the year. I do love it when you eat the end products.

Alexander Kirk

As far as i know, for coca cola, you also need to add some base for it to work properly. It's just the big issue with extractions. If you don't want to wreck the thing that you're taking it from, it's very very difficult (often impossible).

Nile Red

I liked the video very much I’m just wondering how they remove caffeine from energy drinks it’s strange how that coffee which is more basic than red bull the caffeine can be extracted and Coca Cola which is more acidic than red bull you can remove the caffeine but when you approach a equal distance between acidity and basic you can not remove most of the caffeine without being soo complicated.