Caffeine in The Outer Worlds
Some research and my headcanons about where these caffeine drinks are coming from.
There are several caffeine drinks in Halcyon, such as the energy drinks, trip-teaz, two kinds of fizzy tea, etc. But there are no coffee drinks.
Up until the mid-20th century, you got caffeine by extracting it from coffee beans, tea leaves (real tea: not herbal “teas”) or kola nuts. But the global demand for caffeine required more than could be produced by natural sources.
Today, synthetic caffeine accounts for the bulk of caffeine consumed in non-coffee/tea drinks. This is the stuff used in sodas, energy drinks and other caffeinated products that aren’t coffee or tea. (Yes, colas too now use fake caffeine.)
Looking at Halcyon’s caffeine drinks, there’s no coffee. But what about the teas? Well, the fizzy teas are “flavored tripicale tea brewed using soda water”. Trip-teaz is the same thing, advertised as “brewed from tripicale leaves”.
So what’s tripicale? Based on the Tripicale Pasta Pack, and Tarmac and Cheese (which has macaroni), it sounds more like a grain. Tripsacum genus is a grass family; Triticale is a wheat/rye hybrid (i.e. another grass). Combining those two to get Tripicale, my conclusion is that Tripicale is a grain.
Therefore, the “teas” are either brewed from Tripicale grains like barley tea, or from the leaves as noted in Trip-teaz, which still means: no natural source of caffeine, and these aren’t real “teas” since they don’t have Camellia sinensis anywhere in them.
Coffee, “real” tea, and cola are fairly labor intensive, and we’ve seen that Halcyon doesn’t have a lot of extra workers. So fake caffeine makes sense; it can be made in a factory cheaper than extracting it from natural sources. Note that chemically, "synthetic" and "real" caffeine function the same way in the human body, so what's more important for this discussion is where the caffeine comes from. (Many sites try to posit fake caffeine as worse than "natural" caffeine even though they are chemically identical.)
Where does fake caffeine come from? It starts with ammonia, which is converted to urea, then uracil, which takes a few more steps to become raw synthetic caffeine. Of especial interest to Fallout fans, raw synthetic caffeine is reported to glow with a blue phosphorescence! Which provides an alternate explanation for Nuka-Cola Quantum’s blue glow, rather than the adding a radioactive strontium molecule, and also Quantum’s slogan of “twice the caffeine”. (I couldn't find any images to support this claim of a blue glow.)
In the real world, though, the blue glow is reportedly scrubbed out using chloroform (among other chemicals), and you get pure caffeine that you can then add in small doses to consumables. Again, functionally identical to naturally-derived caffeine.
Sources of ammonia include gas giants (which we know Halcyon has), but also many natural sources, including human and animal waste, and it’s used in fertilizer.
A side note of this is that real coffee, tea, etc are probably completely unknown in Halcyon. They would have been luxury goods, probably from Earth, as they’re not necessary for day to day life. Synthetic caffeine does just fine for their unregulated stimulant needs and can be factory-made.
tl;dr: Halcyon uses factory-made synthetic caffeine for their caffeine drinks and consumables.
