Why are sun-treated coffee beans called secondary beans in the past?

We can often hear such a saying: "Sun-treated beans were secondary beans a long time ago." I believe many friends are as surprised as when they first heard about it in front of the street. How can beans be graded because of different treatments? So, it started centuries ago!

According to Middle Eastern literature, coffee made its debut in 1400, while washing treatment went out of the Caribbean islands in 1850. Before the washing treatment was spread, the coffee beans imported by European countries from Yemen, Java and Latin America were all sun-treated. You know, for three hundred years before 1750, coffee-producing areas around the world had to trade coffee through Yemen, so Yemen alone can summarize most coffee-producing areas! (that is to say, during the 450 years from 1400 to 1850, almost all coffee producing areas around the world used sun treatment. At that time, the main method of sun treatment was to spread the coffee fruit directly and let the whole fruit full of nutrients to ferment and dry. the fermentation of the fruit can attract more microorganisms to participate in decomposition, fermentation and make the flavor more rich! Under proper control, sun-treated beans will have a very rich flavor, a high degree of sweetness, and mellow body! Of course, the premise is that it must be properly controlled!

Qianjie once mentioned in Harald's article: the reason why Yemeni coffee and Harald coffee have the same wild flavor, in addition to roughly the same climate, but also the use of the same rough sun treatment! In many cases, in order to save money and trouble, farmers pick immature green fruits together with ripe red fruits and spread them directly on any plane without screening, such as their doorway, roof, roadside or non-moistureproof grass mats, making coffee fruits easily contaminated by dust or damp. There are also some farmers who are reluctant to abandon the fruits with defects (moldy and rotten) and merge them directly into the intact fruits and deal with them together! And due to the lack of control of the time of the sun, coffee beans are often over-fermented, contaminated, and then produce mildew and sour smell. Therefore, after the birth of the sun-treated coffee beans, it has gradually become synonymous with inferior products.

The reason for the birth of water washing treatment is that after the coffee beans were transplanted to the Caribbean islands, it was found that the climatic environment of the islands was not suitable for whole fruit drying. Because the sun treatment takes a long time, and the island belongs to the humid and rainy climate. Coffee fruit in this environment is bound to need to dry for a longer time, and, mildew rate is higher, it is easy to destroy more than half a year of hard work. Therefore, in 1730, the West Indies in the Caribbean Sea appeared the method of peeling and gluing according to local conditions. But at this time, people are still more traditional, so washing treatment has not been popular.

It was more than a hundred years later (1850) that washing treatment became truly popular. People began to fall in love with this "untraditional" treatment, because the washing treatment takes a very short time to dry, and the coffee is very clean and has a clear flavor. As a result, in addition to the use of sun treatment in Brazil, other producing areas have gradually changed the sun treatment of coffee to water washing treatment. There are advantages and disadvantages, the disadvantage of washing treatment is that it needs to consume a lot of water resources, which is more expensive. Therefore, under normal circumstances, people only use water washing treatment for high-quality coffee fruits, while the selected, inferior fruits are treated by the sun, so the second-grade products are like a brand. It has been preserved on sun-treated coffee beans for a very long time.

It was not until the emergence of two heavyweight brands that the century-old stigma of tanning treatment was thoroughly washed away! One is the Edido Valley of Ethiopia (Idido Mist Valley), and the other is Panama's 90 + (Ninety Plus). Instead of the mainstream washing treatment in the boutique world, they use the sun treatment to produce sun-dried coffee beans with high cleanliness and great flavor. These coffees swept away the sun haze of the farmers for many years, and turned to BOP, which has only water washing group raw beans all the year round, and proposed a new competition system to add the "sun group". Therefore, although there is still a practice of "secondary sun-dried beans", it is only a small number, and most of the others are exquisite sun-dried beans that are in a good environment and are carefully controlled.

-END-

Front Street Cafe

No. 10 Baoqian street, Yandun road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu district, Guangzhou, Guangdong province