Taking the caffeine out of RedBull so I can drink it at night

this video has been sponsored by Ray Khan for as long as I can remember I've always been a big fan of energy drinks but maybe surprisingly it's not even for the caffeine I just like the weird chemical taste that they have and for some reason I've always liked Red Bull the most my only issue is that I think I'm a bit sensitive to caffeine and if I ever have one later than like 4 p.m. it makes it almost impossible to fall asleep so for years I've wanted them to make a caffeine free Red Bull that I'd be able to drink at night I never really did anything to make this happen until this past January when I decided to email Red Bull I honestly didn't think they'd ever respond but I figured that it was worth asking just to see what they'd say I was very surprised that they actually got back to me in less than 24 hours but I was very unsurprised that they completely rejected my idea now knowing that they weren't gonna help me at all I had no choice but to somehow do it myself the only issue though and the main reason why I didn't try doing this years ago is that it might actually be impossible this is because most of the time when you extract something you're willing to completely destroy the thing that you're taking it from in this case though I had to somehow take out just the caffeine and not touch or modify anything else that was in there I also couldn't use any chemicals that might be left behind and if I took out even small amounts of certain ingredients it could really change the flavor this left me with very few options and after thinking about it for a long time I felt that there was only one way to do it by using an organic solvent that doesn't mix with water it might be possible to selectively pull out just the caffeine I did something like this years ago where I used the solvent called DCM to extract the caffeine from tea and coffee the caffeine that I got was surprisingly pure and it didn't seem to pull out much else there is a major difference though between coffee and Red Bull and that is acidity in general coffees slightly acidic with a pH of around 5 but Red Bull and other sodas tend to be a lot more acidic and this is a major problem because caffeine doesn't like to get extracted when things are acidic when I did it with the coffee I didn't care about the actual coffee and I threw in a bunch of bass to artificially raise the pH however in this case I wouldn't be able to add anything I was able to find a chart though and Red Bull is apparently one of the less acidic sodas out there which gave me hope that this extraction might be possible but it was still quite acidic with a pH of three point four three and this meant that a lot of it might not be extractable however knowing the pH it should have been possible to calculate how much I could take out to do this I just needed a property of the caffeine called the pKa the pKa is kind of a measurement of how acidic a molecule is and for most common chemicals this number is pretty consistent but for some reason it seems like nobody knows what's going on with caffeine I found some sources that said it's PKA was as low as point six or 0.8 and some said 14 others said that it was 0.8 and 14 and some said that it was just eight point three or ten point four the problem here is that if it is actually less than one then a hundred percent of it is extractable and everything should work perfectly but if it's actually eight point three or above it's closer to zero percent extractable and it's a complete waste of time my personal feeling just by looking at the caffeine molecule was that it was probably closer to the lower values so I figured it was still worth trying out before if you get started though I also had to look at the ingredients list on the can I had to check the solubility of each ingredient and to see if any of them would dissolve in DCM from all the named ingredients I was happy to see that caffeine was apparently the only one however I was a bit spooked out by the artificial flavors and colors because it was very possible for those to get pulled out along with the caffeine the color didn't really matter but the flavor was definitely an issue and unfortunately there was no way for me to find out exactly what these artificial flavors were so just like with the pKa I kind of just had to try it out and see what happened to get this all started I got a couple cans of Red Bull and I emptied them into a dish then after that I put it into a food desiccator that's normally meant to dry things like fruits and vegetables what I was trying to do here was get rid of most of the water to reduce the scale that I had to work on this was just make things easier in general and it would let me use less solvent for the extraction at the same time it would also get rid of all the carbonation which would have made the extraction absolutely impossible I set the desiccator at the lowest temperature setting because I was a bit worried that it might mess up the flavor if it got too hot I had no idea if this was actually even an issue but I felt that it was safer this way and the only difference was that it would take a bit longer I also had no idea how long to run it for but I just randomly felt that 10 hours was probably good so I just let it run overnight and this was what I had the next day it looked like most of the water was gone but what I really liked was that it didn't look like it had become too syrupy what I had to do now was taste it to make sure that leaving it overnight in open air hadn't messed up the flavor just tastes like concentrated Red Bull it's actually pretty good okay that's good guys okay so it seemed to be fine and I could now move on to the extraction part to do this I first poured it all into a beaker to see how much I had it was apparently only a hundred mils which meant that I'd gotten rid of 400 mils of water I'm not sure how much water was left but I can't imagine there was very much I then poured all of this into a separatory funnel and on top of it I added 30 mils of DCM the DCM had a much higher density and it also couldn't mix into the syrup so almost all of it just quickly sank to the bottom the idea here was at the caffeine and hopefully nothing else was much more soluble in the DCM this would cause the caffeine to prefer being in the DCM and it should slowly get pulled from the syrup but just letting it sit like this wouldn't work very well because the two liquids are barely touching to have an efficient extraction I had to maximize the surface area between the two and this is usually done by just shaking it so I sealed the funnel with a stopper took it off the stand and I really tried to mix them together when I felt that I had done a decent job I put it back on the stand and I waited for it to separate again however it was at this moment that I realized I had made a huge mistake over the last year I've done very few projects that required me to do a liquid extraction like this using DCM and because of this I totally forgot about one of the biggest problems with DCM it really likes to form emulsions and with some things if you shake it too hard it can take days to separate to fix this you can usually add salt or something to break the emulsion but in this case I couldn't add anything I tried non-chemical methods though like using an ultrasonic bath or just heating it up but both of them completely failed as a final last-ditch effort I tried just adding a bunch more DCM it ended up kind of working and I did get some separation but the bottom DCM layer was still a pretty bad emulsion so I unfortunately had to start over again but thankfully I wasn't actually too far in so it wasn't that bad I just cracked open a couple more cans of red ball and poured them into the same dishes before I then put it back into the desiccator and I let it run overnight the next day I again had a hundred mils of concentrated stuff but for some reason it was a lot darker than the first run and I'm not really sure why but either way I poured it all back into the separatory funnel I then added the DCM just like before but now I had to be very careful this time I didn't shake it and I just gently rocked it back and forth this unfortunately makes the extraction a lot less efficient but I really had no choice after doing this for about a minute I put it back on the stand and the two layers immediately formed one thing that surprised me was that the DCM was still completely colorless I mentioned before that I thought that it might pull the dye out as well but it apparently didn't touch it at all this gave me hope that it also wasn't touching or removing any of the flavour but that was mostly just wishful thinking I waited 30 minutes for the layers to separate a bit more and then I drained out all the DCM this first extraction probably took out most of the caffeine but some of it was still definitely there so I repeated the exact same extraction three more times but instead of using 30 mils of DCM I only used 15 after each extraction I drained out the DCM and when it was done I had about 75 mils in this DCM was all the caffeine that I had removed but I'll come back to this in a bed the syrup that was still in the funnel should now be hopefully caffeine free however it now has a lot of DCM in it this is because even though the DCM wasn't able to mix with it a small amount was still able to dissolve into it so drinking it like this would not only be dangerous it would also probably taste terrible but thankfully DCM is highly volatile and it's very easy to get rid of by just pulling a vacuum on it to do this I poured it all into a round bottom flask and I washed the beaker with a bit of water to make sure that I had transferred everything after that I dropped in a stir bar and attached a vacuum adapter that I had already hooked up to my vacuum pump I also closed the valve because it would make an absolute mess if I just instantly pulled a full vacuum with strong stirring I turned on the pump and I slowly opened the valve and this caused the DCM to start boiling the goal now was to slowly open the valve and to gradually bring it to a full vacuum this had to be done very carefully and it took about 40 minutes to completely open it at this point almost all the DCM was gone but I still had to keep pulling a vacuum on it for at least several hours this was just to really make sure that there was absolutely no DCM left while I was waiting for that to finish I went back to the DCM solution that should have all the caffeine in it to know if I had actually made caffeine free red ball or to know if I'd even take in any of the caffeine out I had to ice to do this I basically just had to evaporate off the DCM but before I could do that I had to clean it up a bit this was very similar to what I just did for the extraction and I poured it all back into a separatory funnel then on top of this I added some saturated salt solution which would dissolve some of the syrup that I accidentally drained along with it and it would also help dry the DCM just by looking at it that DCM didn't look particularly wet but just like how some of the DCM dissolved into the syrup some of the water that was in the syrup was able to dissolve into the DCM like before I shook it very carefully and I waited for the layers to separate after about an hour the separation still wasn't perfect but it was good enough so I drained out the lower DCM layer all the salt solution that was still in the funnel was just waste and I was able to get rid of it even after this the DCM was probably still a bit wet and to really dry it up I added some drying agent I let it stir like this for a few minutes and then I filtered it through some cotton I also thoroughly washed both the beaker and the drying agent with a bunch of extra DCM I did this just to really make sure that there was no caffeine left behind now to get the caffeine out of this I just gently heated it to evaporate all the DCM when there was only a very small amount left I transferred it all to a vial I did my best not to spill anything but hot DCM has a tendency to throw itself out of pipettes I was initially doing a pretty good job avoiding that but I of course messed it up with the very last bit it was only a drop but it still made me a bit sad to make sure that nothing was left behind I also wash the beaker a few times with a small amount of fresh DCM then after that once everything was in the vial I continued evaporating it there was eventually almost nothing left and I started to get worried that maybe I had barely extracted anything however at the very end a small amount of solid stuff thankfully appeared this was hopefully just caffeine and the amount seemed to be about right in the original red ball syrup there was only supposed to be a hundred and sixty milligrams of caffeine and just visually that kind of looked like what I had it did smell though just like red ball which meant that I definitely pulled out some of the other stuff as well I then mixed it up and I let it sit there for a bit just to make sure that all the DCM was gone after that I went and waited to see how much I actually had I was really hoping that it would just magically tell me that it was exactly a hundred and sixty milligrams but that of course wasn't what happened however it also wasn't as horrible as it could have been I had apparently taken out 46 milligrams but if I include the drop that I lost on the plate it was probably closer to 47 as I mentioned before there was actually a hundred and sixty milligrams in the Red Bull which meant that I had removed about 29% of it so my Red Bull wasn't exactly caffeine free and it was looking more like it was caffeine reduced I had to make sure though that this was actually caffeine and the first thing that I tested was its melting point to do this I poked at the caffeine with a capillary tube and I got a small amount of it stuck in the end I then tapped it against the table for a few minutes to knock it all down to the bottom the sample was now ready and to test it I loaded it into my new and fancy melting point machine from this I saw that it started melting when it was still below 200 C but then it really slowed down and this was probably just caused by some impurities the majority of it was still solid and it only started melting again once it got to around 215 it then took until it was above around 233 for it to completely liquefy a pure sample of caffeine melts between 227 C and 235 which meant that this definitely wasn't pure but what I had was pretty close the fact that it was so close was pretty good evidence that what I had here was caffeine but I still had to confirm things further to do this I then did something called thin layer chromatography or TLC for short to set this up I dissolved some of my dirty caffeine in acetone and in another vial I dissolved some pure caffeine this pure caffeine is actually something that I've had for years and it's from way back in the channel when I extracted it from caffeine pills I shook them around to make sure everything dissolved and I dropped in some really thin capillary tubes it's kind of hard to see them here but the point was that a very small amount of each sample was getting pulled into the tubes I then used them to load the samples onto a TLC plate when I did this I had to be very careful and to only just barely touch the surface this caused the small amount of the liquid to transfer onto the plate and you can see the little dot that it made I then waited a few seconds for the solvent to evaporate and I added a second dot I did the exact same thing for the pure sample of caffeine and after this the plate was good to go I then carefully loaded this into a beaker that had some solvent at the bottom with this setup the solvent will slowly climb the plate and pull the samples along with it at the same time though the silica on the plate is pulling back on the molecules and preventing them from moving they are still able to move though and the distance that they travel depends on how much they like the solvent in comparison to the silica when the solvent got close to the top I pulled out the plate and I let it dry I then shot it with my UV light and I saw that my extracted sample had traveled the exact same distance as the pure caffeine there were also no other spots which told me that what I had was mostly caffeine there was a bit of darkness around the top though and this was probably from a small amount of impurity so between this result and the melting point what I had here was definitely caffeine however it wasn't completely pure and I felt that saying it was around 90% pure was probably a decent estimate I think the caffeine that I had here was also in the hydrated form which meant that each caffeine molecule was associated with a water this would increase its weight a bit and I felt that it was a good idea to adjust for that as well so between that and the purity I felt that I probably had more like 39 milligrams of caffeine this meant that I'd taken out even less than I originally thought and the Red Bull was probably more like twenty four percent reduced now knowing that the project wasn't a complete failure the last thing that I had to do was turn the syrup back into the soda at this point the syrup should have been DCM free so I turned off the vacuum pump and I poured it all into a beaker I then washed the flask with a whole bunch of distilled water to make sure that there was no syrup left behind what I had to do next was diluted even more and bring it back up to the volume that I started with which was five hundred mils however after I had done this I realized that I had made another mistake throughout this whole process I had lost at least a few mils of the syrup and this meant that it was now a bit too watery I instead should have only brought it up to around 480 Mel's I honestly kind of panicked here and I thought that I had ruined everything but then I realised I could just use the desiccator again so that's what I did and I poured it all into a dish and I ran it until it looked like I had taken away 20 mils I then poured it back into the beaker and just by chance it was pretty much exactly where I wanted it to be I thought I was probably gonna have to add some extra water or put it back into the desiccator but this was perfect now to get it carbonated again I just had to use one of those home soda makers and I went with the SodaStream the last time that I used the SodaStream was when I made the diamond water but thankfully this time I didn't have to modify it or anything I could use it how it was actually meant to be used and I just attached the bottle and clicked the button this caused a bunch of co2 gas to rush in and my goal was to get it as fizzy as possible when I felt that it was good I removed the bottle but I had to be a bit careful he'd really liked to froth up and I had to depressurize it slowly or else it would have just overflowed what I had now was hopefully some beautiful caffeine reduced red ball the big question though was whether or not it still even tasted like red ball I had faith that it did but the fact that the caffeine had smelled was a bit worrying and it was very possible that I had pulled out some of the flavor however there was only one way to find out and I was pretty excited to try it okay so it's finally time to try it and see if all my work was actually worth it I think it tastes surprisingly normal yeah I did I I thought it was gonna I actually thought it was gonna taste terrible but it tastes pretty normal it kind of just tastes like regular Red Bull just from this sample it tastes almost exactly the same I think except maybe just a little bit different but not necessarily in a bad way it just it's it's just maybe a bit off it's still very good and I it's more than drinkable but I think I'm gonna have to compare it to some regular stuff too to really see the difference okay so it's it's definitely different than a regular Red Bull the first thing that I noticed was that this has a very distinct smell but the stuff that I made basically has none or it's very very very slight it's almost not even there and that kind of makes sense because the caffeine that I got smelled like Red Bull and I guess I extracted all of the smell what I think is interesting is that the flavor is almost completely separate from the smell I've always known that odours and other scents were added to drinks like this but I never really thought about it too much and I've always thought it was just to maybe add to the scent a bit or to complement it I didn't realize that in stuff like Red Bull it's almost completely faked and it has nothing to do with the flavor I think my whole conclusion from all this is that I'd be totally fine drinking this instead of the regular stuff and with less caffeine I can drink it a bit later so this project was technically a success I think the real dream though is still to make it completely caffeine free but I honestly have no idea how to do that so if you guys have any ideas I'd love to hear them and if any of them seem viable I'll try them out this whole project wasn't exactly world-changing but it still took me a long time to plan for it and to put it all together whether it was worth it or not is definitely debatable but regardless of that it wouldn't have been possible without my supporters on patreon and the sponsor of this video ray con ray con has supported this channel before and a few months ago they sent me a pair of their everyday e25 earbuds I've been using them since then and they turned out to be perfect for when I do lab work and I now use them all the time I really like the little carrying case that they come with and it's been way better than carrying around wired earbuds I've always hated having a wire mess in my pocket but this case has completely eliminated that and it's also small enough that I barely notice that it's there they also have good base a comfortable noise isolating fit and six hours of play time on top of this they're surprisingly affordable and despite sounding just as good they started just half the price of other premium wireless earbuds I personally really like them and I definitely recommend checking out ray Kahn if you decide to pick some up you should also use my special link in the description by Ray Kong comm slash Nile red which will give you 15% off your order as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube you'll also get access to all the older videos that I had to take down and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 3,664,485

Rating: 4.920177 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, nilered, science, chemistry, redbull, caffeine, free, extraction, drink, night, dichloromethane, dcm, energy drink, decaffeinated, decaff

Id: oY8tz1paj6o

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Neutral_man_]

Surprisingly interesting for a subject I do not understand & a topic that does not concern me