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08/15/09 - Regular or No Lead?

We recently purchased two bags of coffee, one caffeinated and one decaf. Unfortunately, we forgot to mark the bags and had no idea which was which. Sure, we could have tried drinking some of each, but the effects of caffeine can be subtle and are subject to the vagaries of human psychology.

So, what did we do? We went to Discover Testing and ordered ourselves a set of caffeine test strips. When they arrived, we brewed two pots of coffee and tested them. You can see the two strips on the right. Each strip has two reaction strips, and you can see that each batch of coffee reacted more with a different strip. D is for decaf. C is for the real stuff.

The upper strip shows D for decaf; the lower strip C for caffeine

Keywords: science