Caffeine In Tea

• October 22, 2013
• Tea_Girls
• Tea Talk

Reminiscent of the legends regarding early coffee consumption, the record of humankind’s use of the tea plant suggests that if it did not contain caffeine, the beverage that we know today would not have evolved.  Were it not for caffeine, the people of mainland Southeast Asia might not have tolerated the bitter, nasty taste of early tea preparations long enough to allow it to evolve into the pleasure beverage that we know today.  Throughout tea’s journey from the fresh leaves chewed for their mild stimulation, then to their use as a component of primitive concoctions of fresh or dried leaf combined with other edibles (trail mix of sorts), to a boiled tincture to Eastern medicine, caffeine was the constant that inspired experimentation.

In it’s native wild state Camellia Sinensis is a rugged plant indeed, both in habit and in taste.  As with most indigenous medicinal plants, the passage of time and changes in use, have led to the extraction of caffeine in a pure, more refined form.  Botanical improvements and experimentation with brewing techniques persuaded the world to embrace an incredibly pleasant beverage that his for centuries beneath the veil of folk medicine.  The idealistic narratives of the origin of both coffee and tea, while romantic and lovely, overlook the practical valuable roles that those two plants have played in the evolution of stimulants and thirst-quenching beverages.  The 1820s were quite an invigorating decade for stimulants: caffeine was first discovered in coffee in 1820, and the stimulant theine was discovered in tea in 1827.  Theine was later identified in as the primary stimulant in several other ingestible plants, most notably Yerba Maté, the South American shrub or tree.  It didn’t take long for chemists to recognize that caffeine and theine one and the same, so the term theine is rarely used today.

Caffeine, a bitter alkaloid, the methylxanthine known as 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, and is found naturally in at least sixty-three types of plants, most notably coffee, tea and cacao.  It acts as a stimulant to the central nervous system.  It is extremely close in the chemical structure to theobromine, the main alkaloid in cacao.  Caffeine is considered to be safe for most people when consumed at a dose of 0.3 grams or less per day.  This equated to 5 cups of tea, each brewed full strength.  Having followed many studies on caffeine as well as volumes of speculative writing about the caffeine content of tea, we can say only this truth with certainty: there is caffeine in tea.

Source: Excerpt from the book “The Story of Tea” by Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss