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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

> In the summer I now drink ice tea, in the winter regular tea.

Is the OP aware that tea also contains caffeine, right? Regular black tea has generally much less than espresso, but it's still a caffeinated beverage.

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Drip coffee has even more than espresso.

https://www.caffeineinformer.com/the-complete-guide-to-starb...

>Drip coffee has even more than espresso.

Only if you also think that beer has more ethanol in it than whisky.

In equal quantities, neither is true.

And if you believe that people routinely drink the same quantities of espresso as they do drip coffee or beer and whiskey that comparison would make sense. But people usually drink much less whiskey and espresso, therefore it's much more relevant to compare commonly used quantities.

what would the quantities of ethanol be in 100ml of whisky vs 100ml of beer?

  40% × 0.1 L = 40 mL.
   5% × 0.1 L =  5 mL.

If you drank the same amount of espresso as you normally would drip coffee, you would die.

Nah, the LD50 of Caffeine is pretty high - something like 14g [0]. Thats way over 100 shots of espresso.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overdose

Why would that matter? Only the quantity in serving size matters...

>Drip coffee has even more than espresso [in typical serving sizes].

FTFY.

You need 4 shots of espresso to match the caffeine in 16oz of drip coffee. This does depend on roast; darker roasts have less.

A 16oz or 20oz latte at Starbucks will have 2 shots, i.e. medium roast drip is double, and even a standard 16oz americano at Starbucks only has 3 shots; drip still has 33% more.

Flat Whites are trickier, because despite having an extra shot over lattes (3 in 16oz/20oz), the shots are ristretto (less water), which extract less caffeine.

> This does depend on roast; darker roasts have less.

While this is technically true, it's quite misleading because coffee measurements are typically done by weight. Caffeine content between roast levels only differ meaningfully when measuring by volume instead of weight. Coffee beans swell as they are roasted meaning darker roasts are less dense.

FWIW it does impact coffee at Starbucks, at least in Canada.

(Nutrition Information linked from starbucks.ca) https://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/94fbcc2ab1e2435985...

A 16oz cup of Dark, Medium and Blonde is listed as 260mg, 310mg, and 360mg respectively.

For those interested, Starbucks publishes caffeine content of all their drinks, which makes a nice baseline for comparison.

A 'tall' filter coffee, which IIRC is 16oz in the US, is 229mg, about equivalent to 3 single espresso shots (page 4 of the link below).

https://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/E3DA4F2E01A148DD88...

Short, Tall, Grande, Venti => 8oz, 12oz, 16oz, 20oz respectively.

16oz of drip is listed as 308mg.

Only if you think people drink beer and whisky in "equal quantities".

In the real world, people drink more beer, and far larger cups and amounts of drip coffee than espresso.

I can drink much coffee and feel almost no effect (although I usually stick to two coffees a day).

When I drink tea, I have shaking hands, especially with the bottled ice tea from the supermarket.

Let's say I wanted to change from coffee to another hot but not sweet beverage: which one?

Have you considered the shaking hands might actually be caffeine withdrawal?

Certainly it is not the case. It occurs specifically when drinking tea. I can spend a day with only my morning coffee.

>When I drink tea, I have shaking hands, especially with the bottled ice tea from the supermarket

Could be the tons of sugar? Or other artificial crap?

>Let's say I wanted to change from coffee to another hot but not sweet beverage: which one?

Tea is great and has health benefits.

The tea in "bottled ice tea from the supermarket" is not representative.

I can recommend green tea. It has also a waking effect but not as strong as coffe and in my experience longer lasting. It is more subtle.

There are many green teas with different tastes and you have to infuse them the right way. Worth noting is that you should not use teabag green tea but loose one. The teabag tea usually has a bad quality.

If you infuse green tea you should not do it too long (usually about 1,5min) and the water should be lower than 80°C. You need to experiment there a bit to find your perfect timings.

TLDR Green tea is worth a try, just don't use a cheap one (avoid teabags).

Sounds a lot like what my dad is drinking :) so it will be easy to try next time I see him.

Context: I stopped drinking alcohol and coffee 5 months ago.

Even though tea also contains caffeine, you can drink quite a bit of it and not get the same effects as you get with coffee – increased anxiety, jittery hands, overwhelming feeling of tiredness when you're on your way down from a caffeine high, etc.

Coffee is caffeine and tea is caffeine, but one is much more potent than the other. I've never been able to push myself over the edge, even when drinking tea.

Tea, coffee, and chocolate all contain caffeine, with coffee (typically) containing the most caffeine. But variation in caffeine levels isn't the only reason these herbs impact people differently.

In addition to caffeine, all of these herbs contain other stimulant alkaloids, such as theophylline, theobromine, paraxanthine, and others. Levels of these minor alkaloids vary depending on the herb, the variety, and how it was prepared.

But yeah, everyone's body is pretty different, and herbs vary wildly in how they impact people. It's interesting how you can drink quite a bit of tea, whereas I pretty reliably get a headache, start feeling anxious, get crazy palpitations, and have a brutal crash if I have more than a cup a day. Coffee is usually OK up to quite a few cups a day -- there's particular roasts that I handle better than others, and I use reusable K-cups for the consistency.

This is quite interesting to learn that what coffee contains than other caffeine included ones. I've kind of a feeling that choclate should be the most effective one between those. It helps to release endorphins and stays much longer in digestion than others. I think these could make chocolate the most beneficial one in the long term.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Having read up on it, it indeed seems that people's sensitivity to tea vs coffee varies wildly. I just happen to be a person who's more sensitive to coffee (the 2nd cup of the day could result in a crash, anxiety, palpitations, etc.).

In fact, the French have separate words for the stimulants in coffee and tea: caféine and théine. And if your goal is to describe the "source of stimulation" then this may be more accurate than using the same word for both coffee and tea as the stimulating effects come from a variety of components in coffee and tea (as a sibling comment points out).

Also, hi Stefan!

There is also a difference in how body absorbs caffeine.

With coffee there are spikes in the energy while with the tea the caffeine is absorbed over a greater period of time.

I've stopped drinking coffee for that reason, now having a cup or two only on Sunday. Before I was drinking two, three sometimes more cups during the day and was really anxious. Came back to green tea and the energy is more balanced now.

Tea also contains L-arganin, which is a nutrient depleted by caffeine. Having not enough contributes to the "jitters" people experience drinking coffee, so this is one reason tea drinking can be a bit less harsh.

Do you mean l-theanine?

yes

Well, we are aware that "much less" is much less right? And the parent doesn't talk about quitting caffeine, but quitting coffee. And that there are lots of tea varieties, many with 0% caffeine.

As a regular black tea drinker, the caffeine in it has zero effect on me. Drinking any kind of coffee except decaf on the other hand makes me jittery and sweaty.

Caffeine is packed with [0]health benefits that outweigh the few downsides though.

[0] https://selfhacked.com/blog/caffeine-benefits/

Depends on the type of tea, for example Roibos tea, ginger, camomile don’t contain caffeine

These are generally known as herbal infusions or tisanes, and not tea.

That varies by locale

I would say that ‘herbal tea’ is a valid term, but that whatever is a ‘herbal tea’ is generally not viewed as ‘a type of tea’, and rather, as ‘a type of herbal infusion’. ‘a type of tea’ is generally viewed as ‘type of tea plant and its dried leaves’.

That's tisane/herbal-tea - not "tea" per-se, you can make infusion like this from pretty much anything. Tea has more caffeine than coffee by dry weight. It also depends how long you infuse it, you can easily have a cup of tea that has more caffeine than cup of coffee.

> Depends on the type of tea, for example Roibos tea, ginger, camomile don’t contain caffeine

With "tea" I generally mean _Camelia sinensis_, and the variety of teas made from it (black, green, white, yellow, oolong, puerh, ...)

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