Tea and Caffeine

My friend Sarah Trench posted an excellent article about tea and caffeine. She writes that tea has less caffeine than coffee and each type of tea has variables, including how it's brewed, that influence how much caffeine you get from the cup.

Camellia sinensis is one such plant. Originally, caffeine in tea was called "theine" until it was discovered that the two were actually identical and the name was dropped. In sweeping generalizations, it is said that black tea contains about half as much caffeine per cup as coffee, green tea, half of that, and white tea, even less. Though as with most generalizations, there's more to it than that.

As alluded to above, caffeine is a naturally occurring defense mechanism for tea, and the young delicate leaves that are plucked and dried for tea are packed full of it. They are also packed full of other beneficial and protective botanical compounds, antioxidants and amino acids namely, that impact our experience when drinking tea. Studies show that most tea leaves contain about the same caffeine content, but other factors such as leaf size, amount and freshness of leaf, steeping time, and water temperature, all blur the exactness of quantifying milligrams. 

You can read the whole article online - Caffeine Nation: Tea and Our Favorite Drug