Will a greater amount of caffeine be extracted from 2 scoops of coffee if you use 4 cups of water instead of 2?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “2 scoops of coffee how much water“
Will a greater amount of caffeine be extracted from 2 scoops of coffee if you use 4 cups of water instead of 2?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “2 scoops of coffee how much water“
Will a greater amount of caffeine be extracted from 2 scoops of coffee if you use 4 cups of water instead of 2?
You will get more caffeine and more of what makes coffee taste like kah yah.
Maybe, it depends. The time the coffee gets with the water plays a role. If the water goes thru too fast, the coffee has less time to hydrate and release it’s content.
Many drip coffee machines have a slow setting that allows for a better extraction, but sometimes that means not all the coffee gets wet, which doesn’t help obviously.
An old trick is to make the coffee wet with boiling water and wait a few minutes with pouring on the rest of the water. The coffee will also a be a bit more bitter and less hot.
I’m sure there’s someone out there on Quora who can answer this definitively. I would be interested to see that answer.
Without doing more research, I can’t answer definitively. I can tell you about my thought process thus far, for which I’ve come to different conclusions:
My original thought was no, the amount of caffeine extracted will be approximately the same. My reason for this comes from thinking about the amount of caffeine in coffee beans compared to the solubility of caffeine in water. A good ratio of coffee to water is 1:17 by weight (I assume a scoop per cup approximates this), which means that the amount of coffee one would typically use for 2 cups of water (27.8 g) would have ~233 mg. However, the solubility of boiling water is such that 2 cups could hold ~312,000 mg of caffeine. Thus, it seems logical that all of the caffeine in water should be able to dissolve just as easily in 2 cups as 4 cups of water.
However, then I thought about issues of extraction. Cold brew coffee is said to have more caffeine than regular coffee, despite the fact that the solubility of caffeine is ~30x greater in boiling water than in cold water (still plenty of room to hold the total amount of caffeine in a coffee bean). As such, I wondered how much of a factor time is in extracting caffeine from coffee. If using 4 cups instead of 2 cups means the coffee spends more time in water, then maybe that would increase the amount of caffeine. But then I remembered that in my own experience making cold brew, I also used more coffee per cup of water than when I make hot coffee, so that most likely accounts for that difference.
It also occurred to me to compare my calculations in #1 to the average amount of caffeine per cup of coffee, which according to the USDA is 95 mg. Since the calculations above would equate to about 115 mg per cup, that’s a difference of 20 mg. Now, given that all of these calculations/amounts I’ve looked up are averages or approximations, that 20 mg most likely falls within the range error. Thus, it could be that no, in this particular instance (2 scoops coffee into 2 vs. 4 cups of water) the extra water won’t lead to more caffeine. Even if the answer is yes, it’s going to be a very small difference.
Whichever is correct, I don’t recommend trying it, because coffee made with 2 scoops ground and 4 cups of water is going to be weak and taste bad.