Coffee bean wet planing Giling Basah or Wet Hulling?

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Wet planing.

This is a coffee treatment method exclusive to Indonesia and two or three surrounding coffee-producing countries. Giling Basah is Indonesian, literally translated as "scraping off the hard shell under wet conditions". It also has another English name, Wet Hulling.

The earliest domestic translation of this word appears in the book "Fine Coffee" written by teacher Han Huaizong. I think that teacher Han's translation of "wet planing" is the best understanding of this method. Other misnames, such as the most typical "semi-washed Semi-Washed", confuse several coffee treatments, so that a group of coffee people's concept of wet planing is almost zero, sadly. Believe me, you will never again use the word "half-wash" in our description of treatment.

Wet planing is no less important to the global coffee industry than honey treatment. The "manning" that coffee people must drink is treated in this way, and it can even be said that the vast majority of Arabica coffee in Sumatra and Sulawesi in Indonesia are wet planed. Indonesia is the fourth largest coffee producer in the world, according to statistics from the international coffee organization ICO in 2014. A treatment that contributes so much to global coffee production must be worthy of our study and analysis.

● coffee fruit structure

Before we get to the point, we need to understand the nature of coffee beans.

First of all, botanically speaking, coffee beans are not "beans". The fruit of coffee belongs to fruit. Indeed, it looks like beans, but from the fruit shape of the coffee plant, the coffee fruit is more like a peach than a bean. What we usually call "coffee beans" is coffee as the seed of a plant.

In other words, we usually see coffee beans, there are four layers of substances on the outside: silver skin, endocarp / raw bean shell, mesocarp / pulp & colloid, exocarp / red or yellow peel.

Why do people mistakenly call coffee a bean regardless of nationality? Mainly because people tend to ignore the pulp part of the coffee fruit, the pulp of the coffee fruit is too thin, the following is the cross section of the coffee fruit and peach.

When we eat peaches in our lives, we eat its flesh; we enjoy coffee, but we drink its seeds after roasting, grinding and soaking water, and give up all the other peels and flesh. Coupled with the fact that coffee seeds look like beans, people naturally call them coffee beans. In the later description, in order to be simple and easy to understand, we still use the title of coffee beans, but we need to know that coffee beans are not beans.

What is the significance of the existence of treatment? Coffee fruits grow on trees, and when coffee farmers pick them, they look like this.

At this time, the coffee fruit is still a fruit body, the water content is still quite high, coupled with the sugar contained in the coffee pulp, if it is piled together for a long time, it can easily lead to fermentation, mildew, produce a variety of bad taste, and even food safety problems.

Therefore, people have to find ways to convert coffee fruits that are not suitable for long-distance transportation and inventory into something stable and not easy to deteriorate. The idea is to remove all the peel, pulp and endocarp of the coffee fruit, and then dry the seeds.

● step

Whether on a small coffee farm or a slightly larger coffee farm, all coffee in Indonesia is picked by hand. After picking, it is customary to soak in water to see the rough screening of ups and downs: leave the sunken coffee fruit behind, and the sundries floating on the surface and the green fruit are screened out.

Ripe red fruit is now peeled in a peeling machine. Unlike the water washing method, the wet planing method uses smaller peeling machines, which are so small that almost every coffee farmer can get one per person, so the "peeling" phase is almost entirely done at the farm level.

The next two pictures show Obasan and Ojisan scraping the peel with machines. The hard-working coffee people will always be so beautiful and handsome.

Next, ferment. The fermentation in the water washing method is to soak the peeled pectin coffee beans in the fermentation tank to take advantage of the ability of bacteria to remove pectin. The process lasts about 24-48 hours, and the water quality in the soaking pool is about the same as the quality of the beans. Wet planing fermentation is slightly different. It takes only 12 hours, uses very little water, and is often carried out in smaller containers, such as plastic pots or even plastic bags. After this brief fermentation, most of the pectin adhered to the bean shell can be easily washed off, leaving a small amount of pectin left on the bean shell. This step is also done at the coffee farm level.

Coffee farmers bag the wet sticky coffee with shell beans and sell it to others at the farmers' market where they meet once a week, often to buyers at processing stations. The purchasing unit is calculated by volume, and there are pre-measured special buckets, one liter or two liters per barrel, and pay coffee farmers at the price of XX yuan per liter of coffee beans. Buyers often pay by stages by observing the amount of residual pectin adhered to the bean shell. Those with more residues are cheap; those with less residues are expensive. The picture below is a dedicated one-liter scalar barrel "a litera can".

After a lot of wet shell beans are collected by the treatment station, the undried shell beans (35% murmur45% water content) are sent directly to the shell machine, scraping off the bean shell and the pectin adhered to the shell. This is called "wet plane". This step is different from all other treatments, no matter washing, sun or honey treatment, all is to dry the shelled beans (11% water content) and then "dry" to remove the shells.

The shell of ● wet planing coffee beans is also fastidious. The picture above is a special shelling machine for Indonesian wet planing. In terms of light size, it is three times the size of a water-washed sheller. What is more important than size is the nature of the grinding core. The picture below is a wet-shaved raw bean that has just taken off its shell, and its humidity is very high.

The surface of wet raw beans is whitish and slightly swollen. Such raw beans are very soft, and if you use a washing machine with a metal core inside, the beans will soon be ground to pieces. An American processor made a desperate attempt once out of curiosity. "only about 1/10 of the beans are intact," cried the Yankee. As a result, the Indonesian people have their own magic version of the shelling machine, in order to adapt to the expanded beans, not only have a thicker caliber, but also use a softer and more frictional plastic grinding core, although there are still many residual beans due to the fragility of raw beans, but the situation has changed a lot compared with the use of water washing mills.

The first picture is the cross section of shelled bean dried by washing method, and the second is the cross section of shelled bean which is not dried by wet planing method and has very high water content. As you can see, it is obvious that the wet-planed bean shell is still soft at this time, while the water-washed bean shell has become crisp and dry after the baptism of the hot sun. In the drying process of washing method, the volume of raw beans decreased relatively after water loss, and there was an obvious interstitial layer between raw beans and shell, but there was no obvious spacer inside the shell beans after the same experience of wet planing, and the beans were very bulging. The two points described above make it more difficult to remove the bean shell in the wet planing method, and there are a lot of broken beans caused by severe friction in the wet planing method.

At this time, the naked raw beans, which are still high in water content, are laid flat on the cement floor covered with straw mats or plastic skins to dry. Although there is no perishable organic matter such as pectin on the bean surface, coffee workers should pay attention to turning the beans from time to time. After all, the high humidity is there, and the exposed raw beans are very fragile, and covering them will rot.

Because there is no "tightness" of shell beans, the drying of wet planing is faster in theory. This is not the case. People in the coffee industry call the drying process in Sumatra a "nightmare". Sumatra, Indonesia is really one of the few coffee producing areas with a very humid climate. According to a coffee maker who has visited the Indonesian producing areas, "you can bask for up to four hours a day, carry it out in the morning and bring it back in the afternoon during heavy rain." Some coffee processors with a few pennies build greenhouses! Drying in the shed is probably more cost-effective than carrying it out and in.

The wet weather also brought great trouble to coffee picking. In countries that have a clear and stable weather distribution, such as Central America, coffee pickers brush the fields an average of three times and can pick all the coffee fruits. For Sumatra, which has no idea what the weather is distributed, coffee pickers need to go to the fields to pick fruit countless times during the whole six months when the coffee fruit is ripe. Why? Because coffee trees blossom and bear fruit according to the weather. If the weather is stupid, the coffee tree will be completely confused.

In such a severe environment, it takes about half a month for raw beans to dry, depending on luck. The eldest brother of counter-cultural coffee and Peter Giuliano, president of SCAA, believe that because there is no shell, and the freshly shelled raw beans are moist and warm, and Indonesians do not need a net bed to dry, raw beans can accept the influence of many enzymes and microbes from the outside world, especially on the ground. Perhaps because of these factors in the drying stage, Sumatran coffee generally has a "earthy" smell / fragrance (please judge for yourself).

On the left of the picture above are the freshly shelled raw beans, whitened and larger, while on the right are the dried raw beans, dark green and smaller. Common feature: the rate of insane residual beans.

The exposed raw beans are made in the sun, giving the wet planing method a common feature: the green color of raw beans in the forest.

Among the beans, why is Manning's head green?

This concludes the introduction to the treatment of wet planing coffee beans.

● evaluation

To be fair, no blow, no black, put a medium-level Mantenin and a bunch of medium-grade Central American beans together, and the first person to be shot is often Manning. Its flavor characteristics do not seem to match the criteria we are used to. The flavor of the wet plane is one of the most controversial arguments in the boutique coffee industry. Some people regard it as a treasure, and some people want to spit a few spits.

I dare to sum up the flavor of the wet plane. apart from those slight differences, we generally think that the wet shaved beans have the smell of soil, tobacco and chocolate, and the sour taste is called "low acid", which is very dull. In the words of synaesthesia, the editor said: drinking a wet plane is like a dark cloud in your heart for a long time.

Low acid comes from a shorter, weaker fermentation process and a longer drying time, if you forget the wet plane fermentation, turn back and have a look. As for the "earthy taste" of wet shaved beans, there are different opinions. Some people say that this is related to the beans selected in the wet planing-related producing areas (Tim & Kadim: with Rob lineage), some people say that this is the result of the organic interaction between raw beans and the outside world (Peter Giuliano), and some even say that it is because there are too many defective beans! Of course, there are a lot of...

There are many sources of defective beans in the wet planing method. First of all, there must be some natural defects in the coffee fruit, and another defect contributor is the shelling part, the corrosion of the wet shell beans during transportation, the damage of sunlight and moisture to the naked raw beans, and one point, the uneven drying speed brought by irregular weather also reduces the flavor. Why did Manning choose by hand so many times? Of course there's a reason for that.

● I emphasize that people who don't distinguish between washing and wet planing are hooligans, because you can see for yourself, although there is no difference in names: Semi-Washed & Washed,Semi-Washed is still the wrong name. But the detailed steps of the treatment and the flavor impact brought about by these operations are 108000 miles away. Who says Manning wash, wait at the door after school, I promise I won't kill you.

Indonesian beans have been an indispensable element for matching beans since ancient times, and their low acidity and chocolate aroma are very suitable for mixing with milk. Old man Peet Pitt brought out the second wave of coffee, standing on the shoulders of Sumatran wet-shaved low-sour coffee, coupled with his unique deep roasting, perfectly demonstrated the correct posture of Sumatran coffee, although the star father is getting more and more deviated, but who can deny the importance of Sumatran wet planer?

A wave of praise followed by a black wave, the so-called G1 Mantenin is basically useless, there should be 33% of the remaining times, not to mention picking a few times at the exit of the production area, as far as I can see, the raw beans are picked by hand in the hands of the coffee roaster, and once baked, sold to the store, the store even has to pick once! Some people have put forward a new argument about deep baking Sumatra: fucking deep baking to cover up wet planing defects! Indeed, there is no denying that there is still a lot of uncertainty about the past and future of Sumatran coffee. As we said before, Sumatra is often the worst death on the cup table, because it does not meet our general standard for boutique items.

We should also have confidence in Sumatra. In recent years, the Indonesian boutique coffee association SCAI has been established, and the quality supervision on the coffee production chain has also been strengthened. some producing areas and estates have even introduced part of the washing mechanism, and some producing areas have begun to embark on the characteristic wet planing road of high quality and high supervision. In any case, the editor is still optimistic about the development of coffee in Sumatra, Indonesia. I don't want such a big and important country to carry on with unknown baggage. I believe it still has a lot of room for improvement.

The knowledge of wet planing and wet planing coffee beans ends here.

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