A newly discovered tea plant is caffeine-free

I believe Japanese hojicha is also often caffeine free or light.

Counterpoint: it tastes like dung.

I really dislike Rooibos and find it unlike tea in many ways. It has a grassy smell and it tastes very tannic and astringent compared to regular tea.

I find my favorite caffeine-free replacement is chaga infusions. You can taste it isn't tea but it reminds me of a strong oolong mixed with a tiny bit of orange pekoe.

Rooibos brother,

This is my favorite blend I randomly found outside of the Schönefeld Airport in Berlin and have been importing the states ever since:

https://shop.tgtea.com/Rooibush-Cream-Caramel-001312-100/561...

Hibiscus (usually mixed with raspberry and other fruits/berries) and peppermint are also great caffeine-free alternatives.

Chaga is another interesting tea. It's a mushroom that has been found to have antiinflammatory properites and is supposed to boost your immune system. (You can also get capsules.) Whether it works or not, I don't know, but as a tea it's not bad.

> I always got the impression that's mainly something they do with Pu Errh tea (which has to "age" for years and is thus dusty) = because they don't trust that the leaves are clean.

Isn't it also the normal chinese method for oolong? "Wash" brew once for a short time (a few seconds) to open up the leaves, then rebrew with small steeping increments (probably depends on the specific but the teas I got suggested 20~30s initial brewing — after the wash — and 5~10 seconds increment).

The same behavior can also be exploited for the inverse effect. Solubility of caffeine in water is greatly boosted with temperature. Many of the bitter compounds in tea extract at a comparatively slower rate, particularly as temps approach 100°C. If you want a caffeine hit with a decent flavour steep a high number of tea bags in boiling water for very short amount of time.

This makes me glad to know. I love tea but don’t need the caffeine every time.

Check out this blog post[0] for data on at-home decaffeination by steeping. It requires a much longer steep than most people think.

Related note: An interesting paper[1] found "no observable trend in caffeine concentration due to the variety of tea", meaning that green tea doesn't necessarily have less caffeine than black tea, for example.

[0] https://chadao.blogspot.com/2008/02/caffeine-and-tea-myth-an...

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jat/article/32/8/702/829967

MYTH Sadly

The Truth Behind DIY Decaf Science has not only disproves the idea that you can make naturally decaffeinated tea with a hot water rinse but, worse yet, studies have shown that this kind of preparation method removes many of the antioxidants, but very little of the caffeine.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-naturally-decaffeinate-...

Moby popularized this myth but re-steeping tea does nothing to reduce a tea's caffeine.

For those looking for low-caffeine green teas: I recommend checking out twig teas. Twig teas taste awesome, yet because there's little caffeine in the twigs they have a very-low caffeine content. In Japan they are called karigane (or kukicha). I am pretty biased, as Karigane is my favorite tea... I'm pretty sure there are equivalent in mainland China or Taiwan?

Example of a karigane (disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Tomotcha): https://tomotcha.com/en/blog/2018-006-karigane/

Green tea can be infused several times. Usually, the caffeine is pretty much gone after the first round. Plus, with some teas, the finer nuances of taste only come out in the third or fourth infusion.

So if you want caffeine-free tea, you can use green tea and throw out the first infusion (or give it to somebody else).

I think it’s more the small quantities consumed and the l theanine taking the edge off.

But I’ve gotten buzzed off of this kind of tea at a tasting. That was about a dozen 1 oz cups of five different varieties (which means a lot of second and a couple of third steeps).

Have you written about this anywhere (or can you point me toward someone who has)? I've had teas made from myriad wild/edible plants in the Pacific Northwest, and am always interested in learning more about others' experiments.

Originally, caffeine content was probably an important factor. There's a study that showed participants developed a preference for the taste of drinks that were accompanied with caffeine and theobromine. This preference became "highly significant" over the course of 6 tasting sessions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15772863

But consider that tea has been selectively bred for taste over the course of millennia, with different cultivars seeking out different ideals of taste, combined with a history of experimenting to find the tastiest methods of processing and preparation for specific cultivars of tea.

If you're talking about tea bags commonly found in grocery stores, then yes, it could be any drinkable plant with added caffeine, and nobody would notice. But there is definitely something special about the taste of a good sencha or long jing.

There is no “the flavor” of tea, though. There are hundreds of different flavor profiles in the oolong category alone (depending on the mountain, weather, season, tea tree, insect presence, etc.), to say nothing of the vast differences between red, yellow, white, Japanese green, Chinese green, pu’er, and other broader types. Loose-leaf tea can be incredibly flavorful from the leaves alone, though of course the preparation technique matters a lot too.

At work one time, there was a box of quite tasty Lapsang Souchong tea, which had a slight smoky flavor; I drank a few cups of this tea and didn't think too much about it.

Then, on my drive home, it took me a little while to figure out why my mouth tasted like I had been smoking cigars. Something about the smoky-leafy aftertaste confused my brain.

I have a load of L-theanine capsules, i will have to try this.

Caffeine is tasteless so technically it should have the same exact flavor.

Gyokuro (and Matcha) tea spend some of their life growing in the shade, which increases the concentration of L-theanine.

I've had good results with Gyokuro cold-brew (created overnight in the fridge).

The tea plant.

While “herbal tea” is indeed a very loosely used term, botanically speaking “tea” refers to the species camellia sinensis. Hongyacha is, to my knowledge, the only known case of a caffeine free camellia sinensis.

The word tea generally refers to the various preparations of leaves from the plant Camellia sinensis.

The tea plant is camellia sinensis, so technically any tea not made with a plant of that species is not tea by the original definition. All the different kinds of tea are the same bush that is grown in different conditions, the leaves are harvested at different times and then processed in various ways. The significance here is that they have discovered a variant of the tea bush that is naturally caffeine free, while presumably retaining its other qualities and taste.

The word tea has been with us for about 4 centuries now, so it's no wonder it has taken meanings other than its original strict definition. Herbal tea would have been called a potion before the word tea was introduced.

Drinks from herbal leaves or dried fruits are usually called (herbal) infusions.

Green, white, black teas are all from the tea plant with different parts of the plant / harvest time / preparation.

> What makes anything "tea" beyond putting some type of [dried, possibly ground-up] plant into a strainer in hot water, then drinking the result?

Well leaves from a tea bush, obviously.

Tea in this context refers to drinks made out of a specific plant: Camellia Sinensis. Interestingly both black and green teas are made out of that very same plant. It's mostly the post-processing that make them either green, black, oolong, pu-erh, etc.

Just like there are different varieties of grapes more or less adequate to produce some kind of wines, there are different varieties of Camellia Sinensis. All varieties of Camellia Sinensis were thought to contain caffeine, until this specific variety was (re-)discovered.

Herbal teas are basically infusions of any plant that's not Camellia Sinensis.

Pure psychological effect? Some people feel X because they believe they will feel X.

That said, note that a Coke can can have 1/3 or less the caffeine a coffee has.

For me, it's the type of coffee. Often supermarket-bought coffee that's dark roasted can cause this reaction in me. Maybe it's the pesticide, maybe it's the carcinogens from burning the coffee... I dunno.

I've mentioned this to a few others, and they can now also drink coffee. If they avoid such types. Perhaps try some fresh, lightly roasted, and organic coffee to start with. This way you avoid three possible causes.

Works for me.

I remembered hearing that the caffeine used in soda came from the caffeine removed from coffee to make decaf, so I thought this was kind of strange since the source was the same. But I just went and actually looked it up and I guess it used to be true, but now primarily comes from Chinese pharmaceutical plants. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/13/289750754/wa...

Sugar is also a powerful drug. It makes you feel good.

There are plenty of other drugs in coffee apart from the caffeine. Some are similar to cannabinoids.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00243...

See also this comment on a coffee health-benefits study which suggests that the health benefits of coffee are not due to the caffeine:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...

Have you tried coffee with L-Theanine? It takes the edge off the caffeine for me and makes me feel much calmer and more focused.

Many psychoactive compounds have differing effects based on the speed at which they enter the brain. Perhaps you drink coffee quicker than soda, causing the concentration of caffeine in your brain to rise more quickly?

For me it's completely the other way around. Coke has always given me anxiety and palpitations, coffee just makes me feel good. Club Mate (mate tea) is somewhere in between, I used to feel jittery and almost sick from it but now it makes me feel great (however the high caffeine is noticeable).

Cola: ~10mg per 100ml.

Coffee: ~100mg per 100ml.

Yeah, it's the same for me. Too much coffee, like just two cups, can give me a slight and distinct type of headache, but I can pop 600mg caffeine in pills or energy drinks without anything resembling the same effect.

I wonder what it is.

I am the same way. I decided to try caffeine in pill form, and it gives the the heightened awareness and increased productivity without the jitters and anxiety.

So what you're saying is, to help the environment, we should be developing strains of wheat, corn, soya, etc with caffeine to reduce pesticide use?

We could then further help the environment by dispensing with beds and the bed making industry!

When I stop cold turkey I sleep a lot for a couple of weeks (10-13 hours per day), which is really useful when I'm stressed and cannot sleep. After the two weeks I behave normally again, but I never have the thought clarity that coffee gives me, so I end up going back and starting the cycle again.

I had the habit of taking several mugs of coffee per day. That helped a lot starting the day but had the side-effect of amplifying anxiety sometimes.

Today I mostly don't feel the need to drink coffee but I like to take a small cup of coffee with milk in the morning, it fulfills and is not addictive.

Maybe instead of banning coffee there can be a middle ground?

Near the end of the article, they said there was discovery of a caffeine free coffee plant in South America

There are low caffeine varieties that can be bought just like there are high caffeine ones. Robusta tastes truely awful and has a lot more caffeine. Pure Arabica has considerably less and some varieties are weaker still. Combined with the fact that a lot of decaf is really “low caffeine”, natuarally low caffeine coffee is a a better choice I think. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_caffeine_coffee

I started roasting coffee years ago and something I learned early on is that, although dark roasted coffee has less caffeine, the difference between light and dark is practically negligible. Most people just interpret coffee being bold (as in, dark roast) as being strong, but in reality it's entirely flavor and not the caffeine content.

I love coffee, but have almost completely stopped drinking it. At one point in college, I was drinking around 3 12-cup pots of coffee per day & around 120 oz of coke (I only slept 10 hours total Monday thru Friday). About 2 years ago, I went cold turkey with caffeine. Coffee was exacerbating persistent heartburn. Also, the effect from caffeine was gone, was effectively immune. 20 years of heavy caffeine use...after 2 years mostly clean, I get jitters from a single cup of coffee.

The scientists behind this research called it "tea." The actual paper isn't clear on what the species is but it appears to be genus Camellia. The reason it has no caffeine is a mutation in the caffeine synthase gene, not a lack of any attempt at a caffeine-producing structure at all (as with brewing other plants' leaves).