Extraction of caffeine
Has anyone here done it?
Wondering for personal note reasons. I want to try my hand at something safe-ish to understand basics of equipment and more.
And I can maybe use this to make my own replica Cola recipe as the original had boat loads of caffeine in it after they realized Coca leaves were a bad idea
The highschool/state college experiment is extract green tea leaves with DCM, evaporate, recrystallize, characterize. Real simple stuff. Off green sluge crude to a greenish mostly white crystal when recrystallized. I’ll post up a procedural from school when I get home.
They let you work with DCM in highschool? Nice.
Pretty sure high school experiment uses rubbing alcohol. The one I’m going to try to remember to post is DCM though.
I got inspiration of this from Nile Red actually
I watch his videos a lot.
I wish we got to do that in high school
All we got was a shy/anxious older high school science/chemistry teacher and the mid 30’s fun biology teacher who understands kids and made class fun but he didn’t teach chemistry.
The chem teacher was a SMART guy, hell I wish he could use a lot of the equipment he had cause I could tell the poor bastard hated the job but loved teaching. He just couldn’t use much. Wish we had access to a distiller or ovens and other shit. All we got was bunsen burners, some heat proof gloves, beakers/jars and occasional chemicals
I do it every morning using water!
Well true yes I thought about it in depth
My 9th grade physical science teacher tossed a chunk of potassium in water for us
We got to dissect stuff that’s about it
The forbidden Gatorade 
I don’t know why you’d bother extracting caffeine. You can get like a pound of caffeine anhydrous for probably ten bucks. Or just pick up some no-doze tablets at a truck stop.
If you’re trying to make a caffeinated soda, I don’t think coca-cola uses the regular caffeine anhydrous. I think they still use dicaffeine malate which has a different onset/duration. You can also buy this from sports supplement websites.
If you get into handling pure caffeine, be very careful. Every year there’s people who die by dosing it wrong and try to take the usual 200mg then OD on 2,000mg.
Doing it to get a fancy for equipment and other chemistry related things
Gotta start somewhere
And the cola part was a bit of a meme lol. I’ll probably try it for the meme though at least once, and I guaranteed back then they had no regard or care for the difference in caffeine or the dosage. They probably started off pure caffeine idk though thats just my guess
You should extract something with similar properties to cannabinoids then (assuming that is your end goal). Extracting water solubles like caffeine would be no different than making an enormous batch of tea or coffee. Might not teach you a whole lot and without knowing the concentration of caffeine the end product may be very dangerous. I don’t know how quickly caffeine absorbs through the skin but it’s able to so I wouldn’t assume it’s an inherently safe starting point.
If you want to experiment, just buy a bunch of cheap outdoor hemp from someone in the northwest and try to extract some CBD. This time of year it’s hilariously cheap especially if you get untrimmed material. It’s probably cheaper than most things you can experiment with in this context.
I don’t wanna mess around with hydrocarbons or any form of explosive liquid/gas/solid or anything until I am comfortable with the equipment
I need to learn equipment and small scale things first as I lack knowledge of chemistry in general
Download this children’s book offline, and do all the experiments. Your chemistry skill and knowledge will be better than most here 
seriously though.
Can i find this at a library?
No. It is a banned/collectors book. You can find a free PDF online though.
Tried to put it in the data dump but it’s too big.
