How do you prefer your caffeine ?

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I was surprised to hear yesterday that the caffeine found in many energy drinks was a synthetic caffeine. Caffeine was synthetized at the end of the 19th C by a German chemist, Emil Fischer, who got a Nobel prize in 1902. It was not very interesting to synthetize caffeine at this time, as it was more easily obtained from decaffeination of coffee. But when real coffee became a luxury during WWI in Germany, the soldiers were served an ersatz constituted of roasted rye and barley with an addition of synthetic caffeine. Various ersatz of coffee containing synthetic caffeine came back in Germany in the 1930’s when several European countries were applying economic sanctions to Germany to protest against Hitler. Economic sanctions are rarely reaching their goal, and Germany circumvented them by producing various ersatz for products difficult to get. Most of these ersatz were tasting bad and disappeared after the end of WWII. I would have thought that there is today enough caffeine produced by decaffeination for all energy drinks and I found weird to hear that news. I checked the Red Bull site, where I read : «Ingredients such are taurine, caffeine and vitamins are synthetically produced to ensure high and consistent quality». Ouch, it looks like Red Bull believes that people are stupid. It is possible to get pure caffeine, taurine and vitamins not synthetics, the main reason is obvious : synthetizing products costs most of the time a lot less than getting taurine from organic tissues, caffeine from coffee, etc. Knowing that, energy drinks are the actual descendants of the German ersatz/replacement products of the 1930’s. There are little differences between «real» products and synthetic products. For example, it is possible for a chemist to find if the caffeine of a drink comes from coffee or is synthetic (in the EU it has to be specified on the can). And if I ask you if you can make a difference between real vanilla and synthetic vanilla, I am sure that you can. Personally I avoid junk chemicals as much as I can, and my daily caffeine dose was only coming from Arabica coffees grown in mountain areas when I used to drink coffee. How do you prefer your caffeine, natural or synthetic ?