CHEM 31.

1: ORGANIC CHEMISTRY LABORATORY

EXPERIMENT No. 3: Extraction and Purification of Caffeine

Materials Needed: Reagents Needed:

• Hot plate • Tea
• 250-ml beaker • Distilled H2O
• Stir rod • CaCO3
• Watch glass • Chloroform
• Funnel • Anhydrous sodium sulfate
• Separatory funnel
• Erlenmeyer flasks
• Petri dish

Procedure:
EXTRACTION OF CAFFEINE
1. Place 15 g of tea, 150 mL of distilled water, 7 g of CaCO3, and a boiling chip in a 250-mL beaker.
Note: Calcium carbonate reacts with tannins to form insoluble precipitate subsequently
removed by filtration.
2. Boil the mixture gently over a hot plate for 15 – 20 min with occasional stirring. Cover the beaker with
watch glass to avoid evaporation of liquid. Allow the mixture to settle and cool to room temperature.
3. Filter the mixture through a cotton plug in a glass funnel. Transfer the filtrate into a separatory funnel
and add 20 mL chloroform.
4. Stopper and shake gently for a few minutes making sure that the organic layer interacts with the
aqueous layer. Allow the liquids to separate into clear layers, then draw off the chloroform layer into a
100 mL Erlenmeyer flask.
Note: The mixture may sometimes form emulsion and it takes a long time to stratify. Emulsion
can be broken using stirring rod. If work is interrupted at this point, drain the emulsion into a
250-mL flask stopper and store it inside the locker for stratification. In the next laboratory
period, the layers formed may be separated.
5. Extract the aqueous layer twice more with 20 mL chloroform.
6. Dry the combined chloroform extracts by adding 0.5 – 1.0 g of anhydrous sodium sulfate.
Note: The most commonly used drying agents are anhydrous magnesium sulfate and calcium
chloride. They absorb water by forming hydrates.
7. Remove the sodium sulfate by filtering the solution through a cotton plug in a dry glass funnel and
into a previously dried and weighed 25mL beaker.
8. Evaporate the concentrate to dryness in a steam bath.
9. Determine the weight of crude caffeine and compute for % caffeine in the tea sample.

PURIFICATION OF CAFFEINE
1. Scrape as much of the crude extract as possible out of the container into the bottom of a clean, dry
Petri dish. Place the Petri dish on a hot plate and cover the dish. Collect the remaining crude caffeine
by dissolving it in a small amount of CHCl3 solvent and store in a vial (for experiment 4)
2. Put a 250-mL beaker containing 30-50 g of ice (Figure 3.1). The beaker with ice provides cooling.
Turn on the heat to a low-medium setting. After a few minutes you will observe, while watching from the
side of the dish, the white vapors of caffeine inside the Petri dish. Let the sublimation continue for 2
minutes more or until all the caffeine sublime and then turn off the heat (Do not overheat because it
could lead to loss of product).
3. Let the closed system cool down at room temperature. Taking the beaker off the setup pre-maturely
will cause the caffeine vapors to escape. DO NOT REMOVE THE HOT APPARATUS FROM THE
HOTPLATE.
4. Carefully pour out the ice from the beaker or Erlenmeyer flask in the sink and scrape the purified
caffeine from the cover / sides of the dish onto a piece of pre-weighed vial.
5. Weigh the purified caffeine and determine the recovery of the sublimation process. Note the color
and shape of crude and sublimed caffeine crystals. Submit your pure caffeine to your instructor with
proper label.

Figure 3.1. Sublimation set up for Crude Caffeine