New Bacterium Lives On Caffeine

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "A newly-described species of bacterium, Pseudomonas putida has been found to live on pure caffeine. The little jaspers metabolize caffeine into carbon dioxide and ammonia. They were found living in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus, not in the drain of an espresso machine as one might expect. The paper presenting the research will be presented at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans this month where caffeine metabolism will have to contend with the traditional ethanol metabolism."

Re:Great

[demonlapin]

Methylene chloride does the job quite well, with minimal effect on taste, but some people get scared when they hear that a solvent has touched their coffee beans (never mind that it's long gone). As a result, decaf often is processed by some crappy extraction method. If you can get the real solvent stuff, it's quite good. Heck, you could even make your own... and once you pour off the methylene chloride, you can rotovap it and extract your caffeine for when you need it. (If you've got a liquid nitrogen trap, you can even recover the methylene chloride this way.)