Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

 ■ :■ 4 1 '■>z HARVESTING AND PREPARATION FOR MARKET 63 utmost and freed in places from the cotyledons. On drying, the skin wrinkles a little and the inside of the bean contracts and shows interstices. This is another character the wise planter hopes to see on breaking the beans—an open interior. During the drying which follows the fermentation the alcohol is lost, while traces of pleasant-smelling esters and more than traces of acetic acid are retained. These give to the fermented beans of commerce their characteristic vinegary odour. Various interesting suggestions for improving the time-honoured methods of fermentation, or of sub-stituting totally different methods to attain the same end, have been made, but not one of these has found favour with the planter or attained commercial importance. Those readers who wish to know more of cacao fermentation should study The Fermentation of Cacao, edited by H. Hamel Smith. The Cacao Juice or Sweatings. Chemists, by their researches, have given value to so many by-products that it seems reasonable to hope that cacao sweatings will one day repay the cost of collection. At best the cacao juice is carried by drains to a stream, at worst it is allowed to saturate the ground in the neighbourhood of the fermentary. The quantity of sweatings obtained varies with the amount lost between plantation and fermentary, the wetness of the season, etc., but it may be taken to be at least 30 gallons for each ton of dry cacao beans produced. Thus on an estate of 200 acres, yielding say 4 cwts. of cacao per acre, about 1,200 gallons could be collected from the fermentary in one year. Like all fruit juices it is an unstable liquid, rapidly developing alcohol and becoming sour ; hence it varies in composition according to the length of time it has been standing. Its specific gravity is about