I stumbled on a very interesting and well written article recently that explores two common claims about tea, the first being that you can decaffeinate your tea by doing a quick 30-second rinse, and second, that black tea always has more caffeine than green tea, which has more caffeine than white tea.

The arguments are quite compelling, although I noticed something that many comments to the entry also mentioned, which is that the decaffeinating steep experiment seemed to steep the tea for four minutes and calculate how much caffeine had been removed and backward calculate how much caffeine had been removed at 1, 2, and 3 minutes.

Regardless of that method, at 4 minutes, only 60% of the caffeine has been removed, so you are definitely NOT decaffeinating your tea by a 30-second steep either way. This common myth, often mentioned by Joe and I, seems to be fairly accurately busted.

To read the article, click here.