I'm trying to conduct an experiment to extract caffeine from tea, using dichloromethane as the organic solvent to extract caffeine and sodium carbonate to separate out the other organic chemicals. The question here is, are there organic chemicals in tea (e.g.catechins, saponins) that would not be affected by the sodium carbonate and get mixed up with the caffeine in dichloromethane? If so, what else could I use?

 

 

 

Possibly. I would suggest you first steep the tea in hot water, filter it, cool the water, and extract the caffeine from that solution by partitioning over DCM. You are more likely to avoid organic contaminants that way. If you like you can then recrystallise from ethanol. 

Would a solution of sodium carbonate be able to work with the partitioning over DCM?

1 minute ago, valent said:

Would a solution of sodium carbonate be able to work with the partitioning over DCM?

Probably, but it’s not needed. You can get away with just using water.