Arizona weekly enterprise., 1888-11-17
"FIXING7 THE COFFEE.
AN INFERIOR PRODUCT POLISHED
 TO DECEIVE EVEN EXPERTS.

The Adulteration of the Popular Berry 8
 Big Business According to a Chicago
 Dealer-Ths Process of 'sN1ilung'' Coffee.
 Mocha
 The adulteration of coffee is an evil of 30 widespread and well recognized kind that a leading grocer of this city recently had two column .'ad" in the paper set ting forth the peculiar methods employed and the differences existing between vari- ous growths of coffee This dealer was seen the other day by a reporter, to whom he said ''The adulteration of coffee is a business, and large one at that. There exist, under various names, in New York,
 Philadelphia and Baltimore, firms who do fourishing business in this line
 1.-The work they do-and are paid for handsomely-is the cleaning, securing,
 polishing and coloring of the natural
 bean. It must not be supposed, however,
 that this is all done with the knowledge
 and connivance of the retail or wholesale grocers by whom the coffee is afterward
 sold to the consumer Not at all Prob
 ably fully 50 per cent. of these grocers
 ignorantly buy what they suppose to De
 Java Mocha and other high priced
 coffee, when in reality they get inferior | grades. You see, it is difficult thing to
 determine exactly the quality of coffee in
 the bean. There is, in point of fact, no
 sure test to be employed in sampling cof-
 fees but the one of taking the bean coffee,
 roasting 1t, and making liquor of it,
 which Is drunk. That is the only reliable
 test. What can be learned about coffee
 would in reality fill book, and 1t takes
 years and good opportunities to become
 connoisseur.
 'Now, what would you take this coffee
 to beT' and the expert handed over two
 small vessels of roasted coffee, showing
 beans of handsome shape, uniform in
 size and pungent of odor. That Is Buca-
 marango and the other Bogota. Now,
 did you ever hear of such coffee or such
 places before? And yet this Is very good
 Central American coffee. apt to be mis-
 judges. And what do you suppose this
 isf" He showed another small vessel full
 of unroasted coffee. The berries were of
 all shapes, fiat and almost globular, some
 four times as large as others. But this
 coffee, though not roasted, exhaled pow
 erful fragrance, reminding one a little of
 vanilla This is genuine Mocha, sam- pied ard bought by myself at Alden, Ara bia- They say there is more so called
 Mocha sold here in Chicago than the
 whole crop of real Mocha coffee amounts
 to. It may be so"
 And how about the real process of adulteration?"
 'It isn't called so It's termed fixing
 or dressing in the trade. It gulls deal
 CTS as well as the public. I'll give you g
 few samples of how it works. Real Java comes, for instance, in fattish wover fu ha friY ba : moist beans generate damp heat. Il : gives the natural greenish tint of the ? berry a tinge toward the yellow ant brown It also swells the size of tht berry. To imitAe Java, Macaraibo Guatemala and Santos is used-an Ameri can coffees. When subjected to Q sweat ing process they begin to look more O s less like Java, so much so as to deceiv' { even dealers who do not take the troubl : to test coffee by making sample iquo ! of it. Yet the difference in price is eigh f cents a pound, CT 33 per cent. Tax Guatemala coffee. That is an excellen kind, handsome to look at and pleasant t Y taste. But much of what is sold unde 0 the name is nothing but Costa Rica, O o Rio. A polishing machine will in a fey Q hours give those tho bluish tint and tn 1 glossy appearance of genuine Guatemala :" Soapstone and Prussian blue arc used il !. coloring. Of Rio there is more importe than of all other kinds of coffee-probabl <. ten times as much. There are all kind
 of Rio coffee. Some is exquisite, as fin
 in flavor as almost any coffee. Some CT
 very poor. The small Brazilian farmer 7 will spread and cure their raw coffee righ = on the pampas. In drying the berry wi absorb the flavor of tke manure sodde > earth, and such coffee will be. of course e bad in taste. But you can't tell it hal $ the time until you roast the berry an E. boil your coffee"
 T A local firm which the dealer referre ,t to as fixing" the coffee has warehous u that is crammed from cellar to roof wit Is sacks of coffee and with machinery t 'e fix" 1t. They evidently do very goo I trade. The superintendent was watchin l. the loading of 6 cargo of several hundre f sacks of coffee consigned to popular mi l In town He was not averss to giving
 few points of information regarding tl business in which bis house is engaged 'n Mine tenths of our work, he said ''col IT, sists in milling coffee That is -anothe ly name for polishing The machines use I in the business are plain, horizontal cy nj finders and centrifugals. If coffee is vel ;,, dry and husky we use little pure wate iH about one gill to the bag, so as to give nlcS, clean ana SInOOtn Sppesfalce. II h polishing is done to smooth the berry
 that's all Whether dealers afterwal
 sell this coffee, improved in looks. f
 higher grade than it actually is, is a ma or ter with which we have nothing to d to Weare just paid by the mills and lar: " " dealers for cleaning and polishing coffee II that ends it as far as we are concerne K What we are doing here, however, is m thing which has been done in German of for over hundred years. The polishir ,'s is done simply by attrition- No bluing IF. soapstone is used nowsdays-at least n h much. No, sir, the bulk of the coff Ie adulteration. properly speaking, is don Ss. not in this country, but before it reach - here. Take Mocha as an example. T 3s dealers in Alden buy up other kinds he ccffee-Malabar and Ceylon and others ,e which resemble the genuine article in a o, pearance. These they mix with re "' Mocha, and the product Is then sent all over the world as Mocha Thus, you st an as matter of fact, no genuine Mocha C le ists in the trade, not if you were to se
 your agent to Alden itself to buy it. '
 Chicago Herald