how to extract the aroma of coffee and thee?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu May 19, 2005 2:23 pm

Hello, I'm using a simple distillation setup to extract the aroma of coffee (5 soort) and thee (5 soort). From coffee I got some aroma extracted, but it's ... somehow unpleasant smell which coffee should not have. What should I do to improve it?

My setup at the moment is very similar to the one you normally use for extracting essential oil. When the water starts boiling, I put coffee beans (or thee leaves) directly in the water. The steam gets condensed and I get transparent water coming out.

Other question is, how to extract the smell of the thee.
The thee I'm working on;
-Jasmine thee
-Genmai thee (Japanese thee)
-Sencha (Japanese thee)
-Lapsang Souchou
-Rose thee

I heard that you can't easilly extract the aroma of Rose and Jasmine because the distillation temprature is too high for them. How should I extract them then?

I'm doing this for one of the cafe in Rotterdam as an art project.
I'd really appreciate your advises.

Maki Ueda
etc@ueda.nl

LeftLaneCruiser · Post by **LeftLaneCruiser** » Thu May 19, 2005 3:06 pm

Most coffeeliquers (like Tia Maria) are made by soaking coffeebeans in alcohol at drinking strength. It's also the way i would try first (the easiest

)

For tea i don't know yet which road to go..
I made a tea-extract recently with 95 % alcohol and it is in no way comparable to tea made the normal way with boiling water... But mixed with ice-tea it makes a 'different' refreshment..

I will test further on the extracts.

KJH

The Chemist · Post by **The Chemist** » Fri May 20, 2005 4:35 am

Steam distillation should work okay for the tea flavor, but you're probably losing all the nice anti-oxidants that everybody is so worked up about these days.

John Q. · Post by **John Q.** » Fri May 20, 2005 9:26 am

As an aside - Constant Comment tea macerated in drinking strength neutral spirit for a few weeks and sweetened with sugar syrup makes a mighty fine liqueur.

KatoFong · Post by **KatoFong** » Fri May 20, 2005 11:43 am

John,

I make one with green tea macerated in a vodka/honey solution for a couple of days. I usually do it in two separated batches. One has a little lemon zest in it. The other has none. Comes out delicious.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri May 20, 2005 1:58 pm

Yes, I've soaked 2 kinds of coffee yesterday in half wodka half water, and actually they smell quite nice! Now I want to erase the smell of the liquer from this - I could imagine that I should warm it up to vaporize the alchol, but which temperature should I bring to? I'm a bit afraid to vaporize the nice coffee aroma too.

Another thing I am trying is that I'm making the coffee with the espresso macine first and distilling it. (Thus not with the beans in the water) This has been creating a bit better result than I had before. No more unpleasant smell of the leftover waterdrip coffee... For this I'm using the pipe which is often used for extracting colors. I don't know how it's called, but it's repeating the distillation process itself. I wonder if I should use this. I'm not even sure how far I should let it repeat... but I'm anyway let it repeat at the moment.

Like many of you have mentioned, I'm going to try the thee with distillation. Sounds a bit easier than coffee. Thanks for quick advise!

My intention of all this is to make a 'parfum' of coffee and thee. The cafe will serve the bottles of these 'parfum' instead of the normal menu card. So the visitor will choose their orders with the blind smelling. The deadline is next Saturday... I've got to hurry up!

Maki

KatoFong · Post by **KatoFong** » Sat May 21, 2005 2:05 pm

Maki,

Sounds like a neat project. You'll have to let us know how it works out.