Which will make you more refreshing, tea or coffee?

Some people naturally regard that caffeine equals coffee. However, in essence, you can also find caffeine in the tea, just like in the coffee, which also functions as flavor elements as well as a functional factor. So what is the relationship between the theophylline in the tea and the caffeine in the coffee? What should we do to decrease the volumes of caffeine in the tea?

The relationship between the theophylline and caffeine

Caffeine is a special theophylline in the coffee, which, together with the theophylline in the tea and the deadly theobromine, belongs to ethyl – xanthine alkaloids. But in terms of molecule structure or physiological action, the latter two lacks one methyl compared with caffeine, so the physiological action of the two on the human body is much milder than caffeine. 

Does drinking tea make you more refreshing and more excitement?

Though the contents of caffeine in the tea is much higher than that in coffee, when we make a comparison between a cup of tea and a cup of coffee, we do not mean the dry tea and the coffee beans. It is the brewed coffee and tea, of course. SCAA recommends the brewing ratio of water and coffee beans should be 150ml to 8.25g. So the contents of caffeine in coffee are much higher than that in the tea. What’s more, Chinese people are used to brewing tea over and over again. 

For example, we often brew green tea for at least three times, not to say the red tea, oolong tea and Puerh tea. That is to say, even though we may drink cups of tea in a day, the real intaking of caffeine confines to only one cup.

What kind of tea contains less caffeine?

The caffeine contents in a kind of tea is determined by the biochemistry quality of the fresh tea leaves and the caffeine contents in the tea leaves is determined by the kind of tea trees, the picking part on the tree and the picking time plus with the growing environment. It is quite difficult to get a real conclusion under so many determining factors.

Excluding the contents of caffeine in the tea leaves, the amounts of it we take in also have to do with how we brew the tea. It is a rather easy way to make a cup of tea with lower caffeine, that is, to put fewer tea leaves in a stovetop glass teapot of lower temperature water for a shorter period of time. Or we can also choose to dump the first several rounds of brewing, which is not recommended as we also dump the tea Polyphenols as well as the theanine, and those are important nutrition and flavor elements.