First, How much Coffee Should a Person Drink per Day?
The Singapore Health Promotion Board (HPB) says that you (who I presume is a regular adult with an average caffeine tolerance) can drink up to 400mg of caffeine a day. Our educated guess about our crystals suggests that one 3g capsule has about 92-142mg of caffeine, which means you can drink up to 3-4 per day.
Which Coffee Crystal has the Most Caffeine?
It’s most likely the Brazil Araponga or Colombia! They’re our darker roasts, and the widely beloved internet coffee man, James Hoffmann, did a caffeine analysis and found that his darker roasts tended to have more caffeine than his lighter roasts.
This was because (1) darker roasts were less dense than their lighter counterparts, which meant that for the same weight of coffee, you needed to use more dark roasted beans than light roasted ones; and (2) he hypothesised that darker roasted beans were more brittle and porous than lighter roasted ones, which meant that the caffeine within the beans was more easily extracted!
We don’t yet have the tools to actually measure our coffees’ caffeine contents, so if you or your friends own a caffeine analysis machine, hit us up! We’d be excited to see the TRUE numbers.
What’s the Latest Time in the Day I can Drink Coffee then?
This research paper suggests that 100mg (about one cup) can be safely consumed up to 4 hours before bedtime without impacting sleep.
It’s a little more complicated than that though, because the same paper also found that taking 400mg of caffeine 12 hours before bedtime still negatively affected sleep quality and quantity.
You might think caffeine gets consumed in your body at a linear rate, e.g. 100mg every two hours, but it’s actually more like it has a fixed half-life of about 5 hours in an average adult. That means that every 5 or so hours, the amount of caffeine in your body gets halved.
So if you took the HPB maximum recommended amount of 400mg of caffeine (about 4 cups) at 9am, you’d have 200mg left around 2pm, 100mg remaining around 7pm, and 50mg remaining at 12am. That’s bonkers - you’d still have about half a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine in your body even while you were asleep, even though you last drank coffee 15 hours ago.
So I guess the latest time you should drink coffee in the day is also affected by how much coffee you’ve already had. But as a general rule of thumb, it seems avoiding coffee at least 4 hours before bedtime will help mitigate caffeine’s impact on your sleep.
How Does Caffeine Even Affect My Sleep?
Caffeine taken too close to bedtime reduces your sleep efficiency - which means of the time spent in bed, less of it will be actually spent on sleeping and more will be spent TRYING to fall asleep or accidentally waking up randomly in the middle of the night.
tl;dr too much caffeine make sleep hard! That no good!
Other Fun Facts about Caffeine
Apparently smokers can reduce the elimination half-life of caffeine in their bodies up to 50% compared to a regular non-smoking person! So if you smoke and find that you need to drink a ton of coffee throughout the day to maintain your alertness… maybe that’s why? By the way, this is not a recommendation to take up smoking if you’d like to be able to drink more coffee :’).
Wrapping Up
I guess that’s about it from me! Hopefully you’ve got a better idea of how to manage your coffee consumption. Remember, drink max 4 cups a day, avoid coffee 4 hours before bedtime, and don’t try smoking in an attempt to decrease your body’s caffeine elimination half-life!
If you have any questions, please don’t email back! I don’t want to address your questions, I just want to drink coffee in solitude (but I guess maybe Junwei might be happy to hear from you!)
Yours sincerely,
SK
Resident Coffeeman
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