SECTION XII.
HARVESTING THE CROP AND PREPARATION FOR MARKET.
The heavy blossom appears on the tree in August and September. The principal crop is picked from April to July. A small crop, chiefly from young coffee, is picked from September to December. The produce is sent down to Colombo, the shipping port, from April to September. If the estate be close to a carriage road this is done by carts, which can take from 60 to 80 bushels. The cost of transport is sometimes enormous. It is not unusual to see carts loaded with coffee lying at the bottom of a precipice, while the bullocks which had brought them have died from exhaustion. If not near a road, carrying coolies are employed, or pack bullocks, which take a load of 3 bushels, to transport it either to a store, from which a carriage will convey it to Colombo, or to the navigable point of one of the rivers. Of the various modes and facility, or the want of it, possessed by estates situated in different districts, some idea may be formed in the expense varying from 1s. to 12s. per cwt. for bringing the produce to Colombo.
There are now in Colombo upwards of thirty establishments for the preparation of coffee for shipment, ten or twelve of these employ steam power to drive the requisite machinery. To most of them large barbecues for drying are attached, and cooperages for the preparation of casks, and in the season, which lasts nearly three quarters of the year, from 10,000 to 15,000 women and 1000 to 2000 men are employed in the process.
Though the coffee has been sufficiently dried on the plantation to enable it to reach Colombo in safety, it is not sufficiently hard to part with the silver pellicle which envelops each berry under the parchment skin, and to resist the pressure of the peeler, without some additional drying in the more powerful sun at Colombo.
It is, therefore, again exposed on the barbecue, until it reaches a crisp dryness. (Plate 9 shows the barbecue or drying-floor on Messrs. Worms’ estate, Puselawa, in Ceylon, and the native labourers spreading the coffee to dry.) It is next submitted to the pressure of the peeler, which breaks the berry out of the parchment covering, and sets the silver skin at liberty. It may be noticed that the silver skin, though perhaps not adding two ounces to the weight of 112 lbs., gives the coffee an appearance considered to be unsightly in the London market, and, therefore, depreciates its value; its adherence to the coffee, though the cause is not known in the market, is supposed to be generally the result of bad drying on the plantation, being allowed to remain too long wet, or being permitted to heat after it is taken from the cisterns.
Several processes have to be gone through before the article known in commerce as coffee is produced. In the first place, the pulpy exterior of the berry, as we have seen, has to be removed by the process of pulping, which separates the seed and its thin covering, called the parchment, from the husk. When this pulping process is completed, we have the parchment by itself in a cistern, and the next process consists in getting rid of the mucilage with which it is covered. For this purpose the water is drained from the cistern, and fermentation is allowed to take place, which it readily does after a period of twenty-four hours, or even less on a low estate, where the climate is warm, though forty-eight hours are generally required on the highest estates.