Another developing agent in coffee

Coffee is a very complex substance and I believe that at last count there were several hundred compounds identified in it. The latest one being touted as a weight loss product is chlorogenic acid. It is also a substituted catechol as is caffeic acid previously mentioned on APUG. Being derived from catechol it would have developing capability. BTW, despite the chloro- in the name the chemical contains no chlorine. Its oxidation product is green in color and chloro- is derived from the Greek for light green.

hi gerald

is chlorogenic acid present in both strains of coffee ?
i don't want to say it is established cause nothing is really established
but it is understood that arabic coffee has a poor showing when it comes to developing film,
and the robusta strain takes the stage front and center. if chlorogenic acid is also in arabica
beans (with little or no caffeic acid present ) maybe it requires both substances to work together
to convert latent images to negatives

jnanian said:

hi gerald

is chlorogenic acid present in both strains of coffee ?
i don't want to say it is established cause nothing is really established
but it is understood that arabic coffee has a poor showing when it comes to developing film,
and the robusta strain takes the stage front and center. if chlorogenic acid is also in arabica
beans (with little or no caffeic acid present ) maybe both requires both substances to work together
to convert latent images to negatives?

Click to expand...

I would assume that both varieties of coffe would contain the same chemicals since the two plants are closely related. The difference would be in the amounts. Besides chlorogenic acid there are several other esters of caffeic acid present. It would be interesting to know just what the typical total amounts of these chemicals actually is.

sounds like a thesis project

i seem to remember someone buying caffic acid from a chemical supplier
and it alone substituted for the coffee didn't develop the film.
like you said, it seems to be a concert of a bunch of stuff working together ..
caffenol is weird-stuff it wouldn't surprise me if coffee beans were really just all natural dektol nuggets

maybe i will start calling my coffee beans developer nuggets

Hi there, I can't confirm that arabica coffee makes a poor developer. I also heard the rumours and traded them. But then I (once) tried it and it worked without a noticeable difference. But of course it's a waste of money. I'm always surprized that all over the world the results with identically formulated and measured Caffenol are very similar if not undistinguishable, especially with the low pH Caffenol-C-L recipe that's very sensitive for the "wrong" soda or bad weighing. For me and many others the results are as reproduceable as with any ready made developer.

jnanian said:

i seem to remember someone buying caffic acid from a chemical supplier
and it alone substituted for the coffee didn't develop the film.
like you said, it seems to be a concert of a bunch of stuff working together ..

Click to expand...

That was Alan Johnson in (there was a url link here which no longer exists). Early in the discussion I suggested that Caffenol does not only contain development agents, but also known development accelerators.

thanks rudeofus
i wasn't well over the summer and forgot it was alan.
i remember other people over the last few years doing it ( or at least talking about it ) ...

I made a side by side comparison of 100% arabica with the cheapest available coffee. No Vit-C was used, only coffee and soda. I couldn't see any difference. To make it even worse, the arabica was decaffeinated. The results were exactly the same:



Details on my blog:
http://caffenol.blogspot.de/2014/12/arabica-coffee-or-not.html