A Caffeine Clarification
***Cross-posted from Funranium Labs***
In response to an urgent missive that asked if I was adding an extra caffeine to BBotE (or, perhaps, massive quantities of speed) I must answer with a most emphatic "No". He took a 50ml belt around 10pm before heading out the clubs, was still dancing long after the bar closed and, after willing himself to sleep sometime around 8am, woke up without the usual trashed feeling he got from his usual "Club Power Ups".
Incidentally, I think someone's been playing a bit much Mario.
While BBotE may indeed by the club drug of the future (new ad copy: "The dance-all-night pep of meth, but delicious and without losing teeth"), the only thing I've got in BBotE is what I can extract from the beans. Experience from environmental clean up operations tells me that nothing tends to grow well in the soils contaminated with methamphetamine and the precursor chemicals, so the bean growers around the world probably aren't lacing their beans with it.
The average coffee bean has somewhere between 10-20mg of caffeine in it, depending on varietal. By comparison, the average 8oz cup of drip coffee has approximately 120mg of caffeine. The is speaks to the efficiency of the normal extraction techniques as I somewhat expect that we all use more than six beans to make a cup of coffee.
So, no, there is no need to add extra caffeine. There is plenty there to work with in the beans, you just have to work a bit to get at it. Besides, the happy days of getting reagent grade chemicals by mail order is receding further into the sunset. Alas...