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Comment by Kelteseth | Hacker News Reader

What kind of decaf coffee do you drink? There are differences between the cheap chemical Methylene way to create decaf coffee and the expensive co2 way to get rid of the caffeine.

https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CLP-Decaf-C...

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I'm pretty sure I'm allergic to methylene-decaffeinated coffee. I discovered in the early 1990s that I'd get sneezy almost every time I drink decaf office coffee, but my home decaf didn't do that to me.

Hasn't happened in a long time, probably due to (1) avoiding cheap decaf and (2) the banning of meth-coffee (heh) in the US.

Is that methylene way even legal? It basically uses petroleum fuel in the process right? I assume it was outlawed a long time ago but that might be extreme naievete for US regulatory capability...

https://www.thedecafproject.com/ (Dec 2024) let you order matching swiss water, CO₂, and Ethyl Acetate (sugar cane byproduct) decaffeinated coffee from the same batches of beans. The EPA banned methylene chloride earlier in that year, but because of toxicity to workers, not because of risk from the resulting coffee itself (and it looks like the FDA didn't ban it.) So I guess you couldn't make decaf with it in the US but you could probably still import and sell it?

I don't buy the methylene processed ones, generally it's Swiss water processed or like you said the CO2 processed ones.

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