Sequachee Valley news. (Sequachee [Sequatchie], Tenn.) 1896-1952, 1902-10-02
THE COFFEE BERRY.

tropical climates. The plants must not
have frost but at the same time they
must not be spoiled by the heat The
greatest coffee estates of the world lie
in the Brazilian States of South A.
merica where the lands are from one
thousand to three thousand feet above
the sea. The largest coffee estate in
the world is said to have about five mil
lion coffee trees on it,
The coffee berries you see in the
stores are far different from the coffee
berries when they are picked from the
trees. When they are on the bushes
they look like dark red cherries hang
ing in clusters close to the limbs among
green leaves, In each berry are one
or two seeds which form the coffee
commerce. How they are gotten out
we shall learn later on.
Before discussing the berry we must
learn how the trees are grown. The
beans must first be sown in seed beds.
They soon sprout and little green plants
shoot up through the soil After few
months they have grown foot high
and they are now ready for transplant
ing to the fields whore they are to be-
come big coffee bushes, or, as they are
sometimes called, coffee trees.
The plants are set quite deep in the
ground. 1t is carefully hoed to keep
down the weeds, and when it is four
years Old it begins to bear fruit A
good tree should produce three or four
pounds of coffee beans a year, and in
the rich coffee lands of the semi-tropi-
cal climates tree often bears crops for
thirty years and sometimes more.
The coffee bushes begin to blossom in
December, and in April or May the ber-
ries are ripe and the picking begins,
Then on large plantation it takes hun
dreds Of men, women and children to
pick these red ripe berries. Putting
them in baskets they are carried to the
factories ON the plantation. When the
seeds come from the fields they look
| just like cherry, and almost as soft.
You can bite one and it is not bad to
the taste, though it is much like coffee.
just inside the skin is pulp, and with
in this are two half-round coffee beans
with their fiat sides touching each 9TH
er. Taking out the seeds they do not
look green like the coffee of commerce
but are white.
Each bean is rolled in two skins. The
outer is called the parchment skin
while the inner skin is as thin as the
finest tissue paper you can imagine.
Both Of these must be taken off before
the coffee is sent to our markets.
The first thing to be done is to get
off the pulp. For this purpose the ber-
ries are thrown into hopper and run
through machines which squash the
pulp without hurting the seeds. By
these machines the berries are reduced
to mush of pulp and seeds. The
mush is now carried over long copper
cylinder about two feet in diameter.
In this cylinder there are hundreds of
holes, each big enough for coffee bean
to pass through it,
The beans are next secured clean in a
tank in which a great screw moves
around and around among the beans
leaving them at the end as white as
snow. The next process is drying.
The white beans are spread out upon
drying platforms and are left in the
sun for several weeks until every one
of them has become as dry as bone.
This requires great care and much
work but when the beans are thorough
ly dried they are by no means ready for
sale Each little bean has to be skin
ed. 1t has to be undressed, as it we're
Its parchment coat must be taken of
and its silver-skin under clothes remov'
ed so that it may be sent out in its
olive-green nakedness to our markets.
To do this it is thrown into machines
which break the skins. is next car
ried into tanning mills in which the
skins are blown out in one place in the
shape of chaf, like the chaff of /;
threshing machine, and the coffee seeds
now olive.green, flow out of themselves
The seeds are of different sizes, some
, large and some small, some round anC
some almost fiat. They must be separ
ated and graded before they are ready
for shipment This is done by passing
70 them over holes Of different sizes, s.
; that the grains of different sizes ar
. gathered together, and they flow ou
through different pipes into bags read
a to be shipped to the worlds markets
r These bags are of one size and hold IL
a pounds of coffee.
!. EDWIN HUDSON.