
Caffeine for Sale: The Hidden Trade of the World's Favorite Stimulant - nols
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/26/467844829/inside-the-anonymous-world-of-caffeine
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Archio
Caffeine powder is pretty interesting. In college, my roommates and I stored
half a kilo of anhydrous white powder in a closet. It's incredibly versatile:
you can mix it into drinks or food, put it under your tongue, and even
insufflate it (higher bioavailability, shorter duration).

You have to be careful with it though, because like the article says, it
doesn't take much to kill a person. Usually when you order caffeine powder it
comes with a little 50mg scoop so you can track consumption.

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huac
is 50mg the typical dose? my caffeine pills are 200mg a pop, and i think
coffee is normally ~150-200mg for a 20oz drink.

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revelation
The typical dose varies by your past consumption ;)

If you typically get 200mg through coffee every day, that's not going to do
anything for you and you'll have to go significantly higher.

I can say from experience that taking large amounts of caffeine comes with a
rather pronounced crash afterwards with headaches and general sluggishness.

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kobayashi
How large is large?

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ne0phyte
Not the user you asked, but I took 800-1200mg a day for a while. Then I
finally went to the doc to find out I was having a depression. So I
unconsciously tried to treat my depression, which obviously didn't work out.
The caffeine enabled me to get out of bed at all though. Without it I was just
sleeping/staying in bed all day. And coming down from a lot of caffeine really
makes you feel a lot worse than not taking any at all, just like the comedown
of other stimulants.

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kobayashi
Thanks for sharing. That's rather interesting. I hope you're doing well, now.

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Kenji
For those who are interested, the youtuber Applied Science explaining in
detail how caffeine extraction works:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmM6qa2a90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmM6qa2a90)

very educational.

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nickysielicki
Thanks for posting this. I really like these kind of videos. Matthias Wandel,
primitive technology, etc.

YouTube can be very relaxing. It's like the next generation of This Old House
or How It's Made

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maxander
> Those beans were harvested, loaded on ships bound for the port of Houston,
> Texas, and ended up at a factory within sight of downtown Houston: Atlantic
> Coffee Solutions.

I occasionally object to business' use of the term "... solutions," noting
that my science-educated mind is wont to interpret "solution" as in "solvent"
rather than as in "solve," but here for once I guess it works either way.

The article makes me curious to know what coffee brands are sourced through
such industrial means (though my initial guess would be, almost all of them),
and its interesting that even the manager of this plant has no idea what
products his caffeine is actually winding up in. Are there ways to track this
sort of commodity-flow? I imagine large parts of it must be public to some
degree.

