Chapter 504 Sugar!
"Is this sugar? The taste is wrong." Lulesi pinched a handful again and sprinkled it into her mouth, "This taste, hiss, is pure enough."
Evening The strong wind blew the curtains, and in the coffee room on the second floor, three talkers from around Longsand County gathered in front of a round table.
They each pinched a handful and put it in their mouths to taste it carefully. There were expressions of surprise on their faces.
This is too sweet. You know, the purest brown sugar on the market has a hint of bitterness and acrid taste.
This kind of sugar is as dense as cashmere and melts in your mouth. If you don't taste it carefully, you can hardly feel the faint taste of impurities.
The bakers and pastry chefs will go crazy for this candy.
Lules and Ludvik looked at each other, not concealing their surprise and curiosity.
“Where did you get such white sugar?”
Although Lulesi was surprised by the whiteness of these sugars, in fact if you look carefully, you will find these The so-called "white sugar" is actually slightly yellow.
In the modern process, there are two most critical steps to purify white sugar from the red and black original sucrose syrup.
The first one is color absorption, which is to use activated carbon and color absorbent to absorb the color, that is, chemical impurities, from brown sugar.
The second is to separate molasses, which is to physically separate molasses as an impurity in sucrose from real sugar (pure sugar), using a centrifuge.
Horn was unable to complete the second step, so he could only make a simple version of white sugar, or brown sugar.
But this is already countless times better than the brown sugar and brown sugar sold in the market.
As early as a year ago, when Horn was still living under the shelter of others at Castle Joan of Arc, he accidentally researched the method of making white sugar - the slime sugar pouring method.
At that time, he thought that this method could not be operated by himself, so instead of holding on to it, he planned to sell it to big shots in exchange for start-up funds.
He never thought that despite all the pressure, he would become that big shot.
"We call this white sugar or brown sugar." Horn snapped his fingers and asked someone to bring two more plates of brown sugar and brown sugar. "This is the brown sugar purification method I developed."
"You mean you want to make money from this?" Lulesi was forty-one years old and at the age of gluttony, she ate all the sugar on the plate.
Looking at it, Horn wanted to remind her to pay attention to tooth decay, but he still held back: "What do you think we should price this brown sugar?"
"15 dinars?"
"Wrong, 12 dinars. No matter how high or low the price of brown sugar is, I will sell it at the highest price on the market."
"Why?" Ludvik obviously didn't understand the logic, but he didn't Ashamed to ask young people.
“First, our production cost is much lower than that of the other party. The purpose is to ensure the internal economic cycle, and the requirements for profitability are not so crazy.
Second, in this way, we can defeat the empire's high-end sugar market and acquire controlled sugar workshops and sugar oil shops through Gongyou Holding Company and Flan Trading Company.
Then we can monopolize the empire's high-end sugar market and form a sugar trust. By then we will have the pricing power, and monopoly is the most profitable. ”
This proposal was put forward by Catherine at an internal seminar, and she guaranteed that the trust can be run well with the help of Saint Virgin Bank.
For Catherine, this kind of thing is something she is worried about. The city has done a lot.
"So you mean to exchange grain for brown sugar from Black Snake Bay, purify and process it in Langsand County, and sell it to Flan through Kasha County? "Ludvik's eyes lit up.
If this is true, most of the problems in Kasha County will be solved immediately.
Sugar, like spices, is in short supply in the imperial market.
Although it is not as popular as spices, it is definitely ten times or even nine times more popular than grain.
As for profits, the Megdi Chamber of Commerce even sent special personnel to investigate and study it.
Horn himself has bought sugar on the market. Even the most basic brown sugar, the wholesale price is about one pound per pack, and the price is 2 to 6 dinars.
As for purified brown sugar, the price is even more expensive, about 10-12 dinars, and the further inland it becomes, the more expensive it becomes.
One gallon (about nine pounds) of grain is only half to one dinar, which is equivalent to one pound of sugar and hundreds of pounds of grain.
If you save a little, hundreds of pounds of grain can feed a family for a month. According to Catherine, most of the sugar was imported from the Clove Corridor and the Golden Horn south of France.
But these two places do not produce sugar. There are two real producing areas, one is the Flesh Royal Court in the west, and the other is the Green Dragon Forest Sea area.
The Flesh Royal Court can produce brown sugar, and the Green Dragon Forest Sea can produce brown sugar. Ninety percent of the sugar on the market currently comes from these two places.
Black Snake Bay is located in the northeast of Green Dragon Forest Sea. If we divide the two geographically, they can even be considered the same area.
Since Green Dragon Forest Sea can produce sugar-producing crops, why can’t Black Snake Bay?
The only question is, what exactly is this sugar-producing crop?
If this problem is not solved, then everything before will be empty talk, but Horn believes that such a crop that can produce so much sugar cannot be small-scale.
So this must be a not uncommon creature.
"I also asked the Flame Rose Club and Catherine, they don't know the source of this sugar?" Horn turned sideways and looked directly at the white-haired twin-tailed loli in front of him.
The white-haired loli frowned and thought for a long time before speaking:
"Although I don't know what it is, I can roughly guess it. No, I think it is this."< br>
Lules spit out a string of strange syllables.
Horn didn't understand and was still looking at her doubtfully.
She explained: "This is the indigenous language of the Black Snake Bay people, meaning sweet tree. This is a tree that matures in three to five years, but the branches and leaves contain sweet water.
The natives will cut off the branches and leaves, then wrap them in cloth and beat them with a stone hammer.
The wood residue and impurities will be filtered out to get fresh sweet water.
After the sweet water dries up, there will be a layer of black-red solidification, which should be the brown sugar and brown sugar you are talking about. ”
After saying that, she tasted each of the brown sugar and brown sugar on the plate: "Well, this is the taste."
"Then people in Black Snake Bay can drink sugar water every day, why are there still famines? ?" Ludwick was slightly puzzled.
"This tree is very hard. Who has the teeth? It must be put down first and squeezed with a stone mill. Only after squeezing is finished will the sweet water come out.
After drinking this sweet water, my throat will burn. Too much will cause diarrhea, but no one has tried to use it as a staple food.
But in the end we found that we would still be hungry, and our hands and feet would be too weak to hammer the sweet branches, and then we would slowly starve to death. ”
Sticking out her tongue, which was disgusted by the brown sugar, Lulesi clapped the powdered sugar in her hand, took a sip of black tea, and settled into a soft chair.
Horn laughed. It would be strange not to get sick if he drinks sugary water every day without supplementing other nutrients.
But the sweet branches they picked can be exchanged for food, and they will not starve to death if they eat this food.
10 pounds of sweet branches can produce 2 pounds of brown sugar, which can be exchanged for a month's rations. The people of Black Snake Bay will definitely be willing to do it.
"What is the yield of this sweet tree? How many sweet branches can it produce every year? How many sweet trees can be planted per acre?" After writing down in the small notebook, Horn looked up again and asked impatiently.
"With the leaves, each tree can produce about 30 or 35 pounds? Anyway, it won't be less than this number. This thing grows very fast, and it will grow back in half a year.
As for each acre, I I haven’t calculated it yet, maybe three or four hundred? I’ll have to calculate this after I get back.”
Writing down a number on the manuscript, Horn turned to Ludwick.
"Dean Ludwik, approximately how many tons, I mean how many loads of grain, do you export to the Leia Church every year?"
"I haven't calculated it carefully, but it should be Around 2.5 million dan.”
Horn calculated silently in his mind that 2.5 million dans was approximately 130,000 tons of grain. With the 80,000 tons of grain from Langsand County, it was 210,000 tons.
According to the price ratio of grain and brown sugar, Black Snake Bay needs to provide raw materials that can make 4,200 tons of sugar.
“4,200 tons, converted into brown sugar, is more than 80,000 tons, which is about 8 million pounds of brown sugar.” Horn turned to Lulesi again, “Can you produce so much brown sugar? Do you have that much? "How sweet are the trees?"
"The area of Black Snake Bay is twice that of Qianhe River Valley, and two-thirds of it is forest. One acre of land has tens of thousands of pounds of sweet branches every year, what do you think?" Si asked back, "I would like to ask, are you capable of handling these 4,200 tons of brown sugar?"
(End of Chapter)