Caffeine for Sale: The Hidden Trade of the World's Favorite Stimulant | Hacker News Reader

Caffeine for Sale: The Hidden Trade of the World's Favorite Stimulant

npr.org

33 pointsnols12 comments

Caffeine powder is pretty interesting. In college, my roommates and I stored half a kilo of anhydrous white powder in a closet. It's incredibly versatile: you can mix it into drinks or food, put it under your tongue, and even insufflate it (higher bioavailability, shorter duration).

You have to be careful with it though, because like the article says, it doesn't take much to kill a person. Usually when you order caffeine powder it comes with a little 50mg scoop so you can track consumption.

is 50mg the typical dose? my caffeine pills are 200mg a pop, and i think coffee is normally ~150-200mg for a 20oz drink.

I think the idea is to use 4 scoops if you want 200mg, rather than making 200mg the minimum measurable amount.

The typical dose varies by your past consumption ;)

If you typically get 200mg through coffee every day, that's not going to do anything for you and you'll have to go significantly higher.

I can say from experience that taking large amounts of caffeine comes with a rather pronounced crash afterwards with headaches and general sluggishness.

How large is large?

Not the user you asked, but I took 800-1200mg a day for a while. Then I finally went to the doc to find out I was having a depression. So I unconsciously tried to treat my depression, which obviously didn't work out. The caffeine enabled me to get out of bed at all though. Without it I was just sleeping/staying in bed all day. And coming down from a lot of caffeine really makes you feel a lot worse than not taking any at all, just like the comedown of other stimulants.

Thanks for sharing. That's rather interesting. I hope you're doing well, now.

You really should use a scale to measure it accurately. A scoop will suffice, but if you're dosing powder of any sort you ought to pony up the ten dollars for a scale.

You missed the biggest part: raw caffeine is incredibly, incredibly bitter.

For those who are interested, the youtuber Applied Science explaining in detail how caffeine extraction works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmM6qa2a90

very educational.

Thanks for posting this. I really like these kind of videos. Matthias Wandel, primitive technology, etc.

YouTube can be very relaxing. It's like the next generation of This Old House or How It's Made

> Those beans were harvested, loaded on ships bound for the port of Houston, Texas, and ended up at a factory within sight of downtown Houston: Atlantic Coffee Solutions.

I occasionally object to business' use of the term "... solutions," noting that my science-educated mind is wont to interpret "solution" as in "solvent" rather than as in "solve," but here for once I guess it works either way.

The article makes me curious to know what coffee brands are sourced through such industrial means (though my initial guess would be, almost all of them), and its interesting that even the manager of this plant has no idea what products his caffeine is actually winding up in. Are there ways to track this sort of commodity-flow? I imagine large parts of it must be public to some degree.

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