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[email protected] support@yayateahouse.co.nz is offline
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Default Tea and caffeine

Hi LurfysMa,
I recently wrote a comment on www.tching.com about this subject. I'll
just copy my post from there, so if anybody read it there, please
forgive me for repeating it here.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about caffeine content in tea.
Everybody is citing the same sources and everybody is repeating the
mantra: "all green teas have a much lower caffeine content than black
teas". While this is true for many green teas, there are - as usual -
exceptions to that rule. In the end, you'd need to test each tea
individually for its caffeine content.

There's one published source of caffeine contents of individual teas
that I'm aware of (maybe you could post others if you know of any),
find it at
http://users.argolink.net/purfarms/komchem/teacaff.htm

The list - although far from complete - is quite revealing. It lists
the caffeine content of a "longjing" (almost everywhere advertised as
a low caffeine tea) as 3.7%, while a "Nilgiri Indian Black" is listed
with 2.3% caffeine content.

Although I think your order is generally correct (with white tea at
the very low end), you see that the question is a little more complex.
As to the listing of caffeine content with every tea on a vendor site:
the cost of the analyses would be very high I guess and most likely,
caffeine content differs from harvest to harvest (although I'd expect
not quite as pronounced as between different teas). So testing would
be continuous AND expensive. That's probably quite prohibitive to tea
vendors, especially since most people don't care to know (or are happy
with the mantra I mentioned above).

If anyone here has in-depth knowledge about this subject, please let
me know!

Jo

On Apr 16, 12:32 pm, LurfysMa > wrote:
> Is there somewhere I can find out how much caffeine ther si in various
> teas?
>
> Is there an online vendor that reports the caffeine content for all or
> most of the teas they sell? I found 1 or 2 that had some information,
> but none that had it listed with each tea.
>
> As I understand it, the teas ranked fro lowest caffeine to highest
> a
>
> Herbals (I know, not really teas)
> Greens
> Oolongs
> Blacks
>
> Where do Puer-ehs fall?
>
> I would guess that whites are close to greens, right?
>
> However, on the few sites that I found that showed caffeine content,
> some of the greens were higher than most of the blacks.
>
> --