White Tea Experiment

2015 Words9 Pages

Chemistry IA Introduction In this report, i will explore the effect of temperature on the caffeine content of White tea. Just like coffee, tea is one of the drunkest beverage for people either just like the taste of it or for those who really needs them to stay fresh in the morning. Caffeine is the chemical that was found within both products. Caffeine is the world's most widely consumed drug. It is a central nervous system stimulant belong to the methylxanthine class. Caffeine can be derived from xanthine as a stimulant, xanthine is a purine base found in most human body tissues, fluids and in other organisms. I want to know at what temperature the tea solution contains certain amount of caffeine because my family likes to drink tea and …show more content…

I was finally able to have a chance to test what i have almost been thinking. I felt I can learn from what happens day to day and understand the science behind what I drink almost every day, for me, it's tea in this case. Tea has long been seen as a traditional Chinese thing, and having a family that love to drink it, it was an interesting topic. Most people says tea is healthy and it is good for you, with this in mind I wanted to investigate on the chemical composition of tea. I decided to focus on the amount of caffeine produced with a fixed time from dry tea …show more content…

Making tea solution: Take around 3 gram of tea from tea bags and record the weight with an uncertainty of ± 0.001 using an high accuracy balance. Take 400 ml beaker add 200 ml of distilled water to it. Start heating it up with the bunsen burner until 150ml remain. (recommended ratio of 1 g of tea : 50ml of water) Measure the temperature of water and wait till it reach the expected value Add the tea leaf once the water is 150ml(some will evaporate during the heating) and keep the temperature at a constant degrees by using a water bath. Using a stopwatch to determine the amount of heating time. Decant the tea solution into another beaker immediately after stop boiling to make sure that tea leaf stop releasing caffeine into the tea solution as the water is still hot. Use the sieve with cotton to filter the small particle and gently squeeze the leftover tea leaf and cotton to liberate the rest of the tea solution. Cool the aqueous solution to near room temperature. The tea must be cool (20° C) before coming in contact with dichloromethane which have a low boiling point(boiling point = 40°