I'm thinking of making a coffee wine, will it be caffeinated?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

SnupDave

Member
Joined
Sep 24, 2012
Messages
24
Reaction score
0
Location
Seattle
I'm thinking of cold filtering some coffee, adding some sugar and some yeast (I've yet to work out the exact recipe, but I don't think that should be necessary for this question), and then fermenting it for a while.

I know that the yeast will eat the sugars and convert them to CO2 and alcohol, but will they affect the caffeine content at all? Will the caffeine naturally degrade over time? Will the increasing alcohol content affect the caffeine?

It's not hugely important to me either way, I'm planning on making this for the taste, not the caffeine, but I'd like to know what I'm actually going to make.
 
I read somewhere once that Caffeine is a very volatile compound so the so it breaks down pretty quickly… I looked for that reference and did not find it but this is good… I noticed that in the decaffeination portion they talk about using CO2 to remove the caffeine but it seems to be at high pressures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffine
 
I read somewhere once that Caffeine is a very volatile compound so the so it breaks down pretty quickly… I looked for that reference and did not find it but this is good… I noticed that in the decaffeination portion they talk about using CO2 to remove the caffeine but it seems to be at high pressures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffine

Decaffeination happens at high pressures because the caffeine is extracted from the beans. I don't think (but am not positive) that CO2 will have the same effect on a liquid.
 
This is a bit off topic, but when I saw 'coffee wine' in the title I thought you might be trying to make a wine out of the coffee fruit (i.e. the red fruit that surrounds the bean). The fruit is pretty sweet and traditionally has been considered a waste product, but it was recently discovered that it's jam packed with anti-oxidants which has led to several companies trying to market it as a health supplement type product (http://site.konared.com/) (http://www.coffeeberry.org/).

Anyway, no idea if the coffee fruit would make a decent wine (my guess would be no), but I'd be curious to try if I could ever find whole berries somewhere (which is probably not going to happen unless I move somewhere that grows coffee).
 
@bdh- Interesting. I had no idea. Now you have me wanting to look into a coffee fruit wine. I live in Seattle, and I figure if those beans are available anywhere, it'll be here. This town is addicted to coffee, and we have coffee everything.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top