Evening star., 1899-04-15

have grown foot high. They are then
taken up and planted deep in the ground,
being shielded with leaves or sticks. They
grow very fast, being plowed and hoed and
kept clean.
At three or four years of age the coffee
tree begins to have fruit. Little red ber-
ries the size and color Of cherry come
out close to the branches, hanging to them
much like a plum. They continue to have
fruit from this time for twenty or thirty
years, and some trees will keep on produc-
ing for forty or fifty years. A good tree
should produce four pounds annually, and
a well cared for coffee plantation should
be good for at least thirty years.
The coffee begins to blossom in Septem-
ber and in April or May the berries are
ripe and the picking begins. The berries
are picked into baskets which the pickers
carry on their backs. Each is paid muclls
for the amount picked. and hundreds of
men, women and children are employed.
Getting Out the Coffee Grains.
The above seems quite a lot of work, for
such little thing coffee bean? Yes,
but the preparing the bean for the market
has hardly begun. The berries as they
ccme from the trees are of the size and
color of dark red cherries. The grains or
beans hich we use to make coffee are the
seeds inside the cherries. Each large
cherry has two seeds, the fiat sides resting
one against the other with a soft pulp
about them. Others have only one little
round seed, just like the Mocha coffee of
commerce.
The pulp must first be taken off. To do
this, the berries are thrown into hopper,
and run through cylinders which squash
the pulp without injuring the grains. They
are reduced to a mush of pulp and coffee
seeds. This mixture is carried over long
copper cylinder which is about two feet in
diameter. The cylinder is filled with holes
optn io oh hat a
pass through it. AS the muSh falls on 10
the cylinder the beans go through the holes
into it and are carried into a canal of flow
ing water below the cylinder. Upon this
they float off into receiving tanks OF watts.
Drying the Coffee.
Take up handful of the grains and look
at them. Each is covered with a soft
gummy substance. 1t is as sticky as
though it had been painted with mucilage.
1t must be washed again before it is ready
for drying. This is done in a tank in
which a great screw moves round and
round over the beans, securing off the
gum it were, and leaving them white
parchment or snow.
But our coffee beans are green,' 1 hear
some one sayi Yes, they are, and these
beans will be green, by and by. They have
two shells upon than which must be re-
moved before they can be shipped to the
market. Before the shells can be taken off
the drying is quite a job of its own.
There are or every plantation great ter
races made of floors of cement rising one
above the other. Some of the floors are
more than an acre in size They are made
for drying the coffee. There is no roof
over them, and the hot sun of Brazil beats
down upon them all day long. 1t is upon
such fiools that the coffee beans are spread
thousands of bushels of beans upon one
floor. Among them are men who stir the
beans about with wooden rakes so that all
parts are touched by the sun. The men are
in their bare feet, and they perspire as
they work.
1t is important that the coffee be evenly
dried, and it takes a long time to cure it.
The grains often lie for two months on the
platforms, being gathered into piles at
night and covered up to keep off the dew.
The men watch also for showers, and at
such times cover the coffee
SHINING Coffee.
After the beans are dried they are by no
means ready for sale. Each little bean has
to be skinned. 1t has upon it thick white
hide known the parchment skin, and
under this another shell almost as thin as
a cobweb, which is called the silver skin.
These have to be taken off before you come
to the olive green bean sold in our stores.
The skinning is done by expensive ma
chimes, some of which cost as much as
$4,000. In the first place, the coffee is
run through a ventilator which fans off
the rubbish and dust. 1t is next thrown
into a great corrugated wheel of cast iron
which has grooves so graduated that they
break the skin on the coffee without hurt
ing or scratching it. After the skin is
broken the beans are carried to a second
ventilator, in which the shells are taken
off like the chaff in a threshing machine.
A fan blows the chaff off and the grains
flow down through ths trough to the sep
arator.
The grains are now of a light olive green
color. They must be separated and graded
before they are shipped. The little round
the ends of the stalks viii go into one grade
and will be sold in our American markets
as Mocha straight from Arabia; another
size will be classed as Java, and the we'll
known Mocha and Java which you mix
will possibly have come from the same