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This can be done by the sun or by mechanical means in artificial driers. After seven to fifteen days the beans are known as parchment coffee and ideally remain in this form until immediately before export. The outer coverings of the bean (dried coverings of the original cherries in dry process, hull and dried parchment layer in wet process) are then removed. This process is known as hulling and is usually done just before the coffee beans are sold for exporting . Polishing of beans is an optional process. The polishing process is used to remove the outer-filament and any of the parchment like husk that remains on the bean after hulling. While polished beans are considered superior to unpolished ones, in reality there is little difference between the two. Although coffee beans are of fairly uniform size and proportion they are graded first by size and then by density. (The elephant bean is the only exception). Beans are sized into different grades by running the beans through sieves and screens with speci fically-sized holes. They are then sorted by using an air-jet to separate heavy and light beans. Over-fermented or unhulled beans are now removed. This is usually done by hand as the beans move along a conveyor-belt - it is accomplished with amazing speed and skill. It can, however, also be done by electronic sorting - the advantage of this is that electronic machines can remove beans known as 'stinkers' which are defective but cannot be distinguished by eye. Any flawed or discoloured beans are removed before bagging into sacks marked with grade, plantation and country of origin. The beans are then ready to be exported. Industrial processing must begin immediately after the fruit is harvested, to prevent the pulp from fermenting and deteriorating. The coffee beans can be prepared for roasting in one of two ways. The oldest, simplest, and cheapest, is the dry method. This produces so-called 'Natural' coffees and is adopted mostly in Brazil and Western Africa. Firstly, the harvested cherries are usually sorte d and cleaned to separate the unripe, overripe and damaged cherries and to remove dirt, soil, twigs and leaves. This can be done by winnowing, which is commonly done by hand, using a large sieve. Any unwanted cherries or other material not winnowed away can be picked out from the top of the sieve. The ripe cherries can also be separated by flotation in washing channels close to the drying areas. The harvested cherries are then spread out, in the sun, on large concrete or brick patios or on matting raised to waist height on trestles. They are raked to avoid fermentation and to expose them evenly to the sun's rays. If it rains or the temperature falls considerable, the cherries have to be covered for protection. Alternatively, after two or three days, coffee can be put in drying rooms, where it is dried by the heat of a burner at 45-60 degrees C. It can take up to four weeks for moisture content of each cherry will have fallen to the optimum 12 percent of their original amount. The outer shell will have become dark brown and brittle. The cherries are then stored in large silos where they are able to continue to lose moisture. The drying operation is the most important stage of the process, since it affects the final quality of the green coffee. A coffee that has been overdried will become brittle and produce too many broken beans during hulling (broken beans are considered to be defective beans). Coffee that has not been dried sufficiently will be too moist and prone to rapid deterioration caused by the attack of fungi and bacteria. The other method of preparation is the wet method. It produces so-called 'Washed' or 'Mild' coffees and is adopted in Central America, Mexico, Colombia, Kenya and Tanzania. This involves more capital outlay and more care than the dry method. It does, however, help to preserve the intrinsic qualities of the bean better, producing a green coffee which is homogeneous and has few defective beans. Hence, the coffee produced by this method is usually regarded as being of better quality and c ommands higher prices. The main difference between the wet and dry methods is that the wet method removes the pulp from the bean within 12-24 hours of harvesting instead of allowing the cherries to air dry. The beans are separated from the skin and pulp by using a pulping machine which squeezes the cherries between fixed and moving surfaces. The flesh and the skin of the fruit are left on one side and the beans, enclosed in their parchment covering, on the other. The clearance between the surfaces is adjusted to avoid damage to the beans. The lighter, immature beans are then separated from the heavier, mature beans through specially designed washing channels or by shaking the beans through a strainer into a tank of water. The beans are then stored in fermentation tanks for up to two days during which time the slimy layer of the cherry is separated from its parchment like covering by natural enzymes. The length of the fermentation process is based on the condition of the beans and the climate's condition. Wh en the altitude is low, the fermentation time is short. At higher altitudes, the fermentation can take up to 48 hours. The coffee is then washed in huge quantities of water (about 100 litres for 10 kilos of coffee). It must then be dried so that it retains only about 10 percent moisture. This can be done by the sun or by mechanical means in artificial driers. After seven to fifteen days the beans are known as parchment coffee and ideally remain in this form until immediately before export. These seedlings were entrusted by the King to the botanists of the King's Royal Botanical Garden (now the "Jardin des Plantes"). It is the descendents of this plant who ended up producing the entire Western coffee industry. A young naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, was in Paris on leave from Martinique, a French colony in the Carribean. Imagining Martinique as a French Java, he requested clippings from his King's tree. Permission was, however, denied. Determined, de Clieu led a moonlight raid of the King's Garden an d managed to steal a seedling from the greenhouses. De Clieu set sail for Martinique only to discover the worst was still to come. On the return journey to Martinique, de Clieu was to encounter a number of setbacks. A "basely jealous" passenger attempted to steal his coffee seedling and, when unable to get the plant away from him, tore off a branch. The ship was then attacked and almost captured by pirates. Getting over that, it suffered a violent storm and when the skies became clear they became far too clear and the ship was becalmed. Water grew scarce but the young coffee tree was kept alive because de Clieu used part of his own tiny water ration to water it. On arriving in the Carribean, de Clieu planted the tree on his own estate in Martinique where, under armed guard, it yielded a total of about 18 million trees by 1777. The French and the Dutch were, like the Arabs before them, anxious to protect their monopoly over cultivation. Brazil's emperor, however, wanted a cut of the coffee market and, in 1727 , he send Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta to French Guiana to mediate a border dispute between the French and Dutch. Not only did the Colonel settle the dispute but he also managed to initiate an affair between him and the governor's wife. The plan payed off and, as a farewell gift at a state dinner, she presented him with a sly token of affection: a bouquet in which she hid cuttings and the fertile seeds of coffee. It is from these shoots that the world's greatest coffee empire and the great coffee plantations of Latin America emerged. By 1800 Brazil's monster harvests would turn coffee from a drink for the elite into an everyday drink for the people. More recently, the welfare of growing areas has become of more concern and so there is a greater degree of control over the turning of land into coffee plantations and better trading deals are being negotiated. The twentieth century has seen a number of important developments in coffee including the development of both instant and decaffeinated coffees. Dec affeinated coffee was first invented in 1903 when a German coffee importer, Ludwig Roselius, turned a batch of ruined coffee beans over to researchers. Although not the first to remove caffeine, they perfected the process of removing caffeine from the beans without destroying any flavour. He marketed the coffee under the brand name "Sanka" (a contraction of "sans caffeine"). Sanka was introduced into the US in 1923. The first soluble coffee was invented by a Japanese-American chemist called Satori Kato who lived in Chicago. However, the first mass produced instant coffee, was the invention of George Constant Washington, an English chemist living in Guatemala. While waiting for his wife one day to join him in the garden for coffee, he noticed on the spout of the silver coffee pot, a fine powder, which seemed to be the condensation of the coffee vapours. This intrigued him and led to his discovery of soluble coffee.
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