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"Hey, Brother Geng's words make a lot of sense, the stone is much harder than the wood. As for the iron one, how much iron does it cost, the cost is too high, and I will ask Wang Mazi at the head of the village to help make a pair of stone squeezing rollers and give it a try! Dahu's eyes lit up and he said. Geng Jingzhong also proposed it after careful observation, and it seems that it is indeed good. In fact, the stone reel is indeed better than the wood, and it can process six or seven hundred catties more per day and night, and the efficiency is much greater.

The sugarcane juice squeezed out before, after the initial precipitation, was hastily skimmed off by the workers on the top of the fragments of grass stems and the like, and then it was poured into a large iron pot to boil, and the three cauldrons were arranged in a zigzag shape. When the sugar cane juice was boiled to the slurry, and when it was not boiling, the worker, who had been burning the fire, began to talk about the foam and debris on it with a large spoon, and then he wrapped some lime from the sugar cane leaves from the lime bag and sprinkled it in.

"Lime?" Gu Ping, who had not spoken, shouted in surprise.

Geng Jingzhong didn't make a fuss, after all, he studied chemistry and made a sound, although he had never seen how to make sugar, but now he understood something. "This is used to clarify the sugar solution." Geng Jingzhong explained to Gu Ping that in order to remove the mixture in the cane juice and obtain cleaner crystals, an important process is to add a fining agent after filtering and removing intolerant substances. Lime is much easier to obtain than other clarifying agents such as sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and superphosphate. In some places, plant ash is used to make soil sugar. The effects are similar.

"Brother Geng is really the first time to go to Tangliao? Or have you seen it before? Dahu and several workers looked at him in surprise. After all, I heard Da Niu say just now, these people are the first time to go to Tangliao, and they are pure whites.

"Oh, I guess!" Of course, Geng Jingzhong couldn't slap himself in the mouth, so he made an excuse and said.

"Guess? Cattle! Dahu pouted and said.

But Gu Ping still didn't understand: "But doesn't this lime dissolve into the sugar water?" So white sugar contains lime? ”

"No, it's actually neutralized and decomposed with various impurities in the sugarcane juice!" Geng Jingzhong explained to Gu Ping in a low voice, "Whether it's white sugar or brown sugar, there's no lime in it." ”

"Oh!" Although Gu Ping didn't know that the prince could understand so much now. But he was still interested and didn't ask any more, it was not the first time he had learned about the magic of the prince!

At this time, the sugarcane juice has taken on a yellow color, and several workers work together to pour the sugarcane liquid in the pot into the second pot, slowly evaporating the water in it, and repeating the process in the first pot at the same time. Wait until you get there, then move the sugary cane juice into the third pot and add some oil. Geng Jingzhong asked, "Brother Big Tiger, what are you adding?" ”

Dahu turned around and said, "It's rapeseed oil!" ”

"Oil?" Geng Jingzhong wondered, what is the reaction to this addition of oil? Why can't I think of it at all? Even if you want to decolorize, you should add protein to it. How can it be oil? Wondering and boring, Geng Jingzhong honestly did not squeak. Read on. After boiling the cane liquid into a thin paste, take it out and inject it into the "tile slip", which is a cone-shaped, large at the top and small at the bottom, about a foot high, with a small hole at the bottom tip, plugged with grass, and placed on a large tile jar to let it slowly crystallize. The sugar solution, which contains a large amount of impurities, will slowly flow out of the small holes below the thatch, and finally only pure crystalline sugar will be left in the "tile". Geng Jingzhong whispered to the workers who were injecting cane liquid into the "tile slip", and learned that a tile slip could produce ten kilograms of red sugar.

However, it seems that the color of this sugar is very dark, and it is darker than the ordinary brown sugar you usually see, so it can be called "brown sugar". The things that flow down from the clay jar are black in color, and the big tiger sues Geng Jingzhong and a few people, which is called "molasses"! This is in the process of cane juice refining, with the continuous crystallization of granulated sugar, the last thing left is the dark mother liquor, which still contains a lot of sugar, but it cannot be separated by economic means, and the sugar in it can not be recycled until the seventies of the twentieth century. Earlier, molasses, as a scrap material, could only take the road of comprehensive utilization. One of the most promising uses is for brewing – the raw material for Western rum is molasses.

The workers said that the leakage was called "water sugar", which could be boiled into a kind of black sugar, and could also be used to make zuò food, which could only be sold to ordinary people in the town, and was not very valuable. Now all the sugar houses here are making such red sugar, and there are also sugar bricks, the method is to boil the cane juice to a paste according to the boiling method of making red sugar, take it out and pour it into a large iron basin, stir it frequently with a wooden stick, and pour it into the checkered sugar frame after crystallization, and cut it into blocks with a knife to make brick sugar. The brick sugar is packed in dried cane leaves in large bamboo baskets, each basket is fifty pieces.

"Brother Big Tiger, can you make zuò sugar?" Geng Jingzhong asked.

"Sugar? I haven't seen this, we're all this kind of sugar! Dahu said suspiciously when he heard this question, he really had only heard of such a thing as white sugar, but he really hadn't seen it, and he couldn't make it!

Seeing that the big tiger really didn't know, Geng Jingzhong didn't ask. So Geng Jingzhong looked at it while calculating the entire sugar making process again, and calculated that the daily output of red granulated sugar in this sugar house was about 150 catties, and the scale was really pitiful, which required five people to work all day and night! And from the whole process just now, the leading fire master Brother Hu himself is very familiar with the whole process, and he is also very experienced in the specific operation, whether it is the size of the firepower, the time to grasp the sugar or the amount of lime, it seems to be very smooth, but after all, the process is backward, and the quality of the sugar is obviously not high. And because the stove is not well constructed, the heat is difficult to adjust, and the sugar liquid has been boiled in a few pots. After adding lime. The sediment is discarded before it is filtered. There is also a lot of sugar loss. Geng Jingzhong feels that there are still a lot of things that can be improved.

Interested in this thing, Geng Jingzhong once again started a routine with a few workers, and asked about the local sugarcane cultivation by the way. The sugarcane farmers in these sugarcane villages do not grow sugarcane in a small area, only a dozen acres as small, and only thirty or forty acres as large, just like a big cow's house. According to them, there are about three stones of sugar per mu. Some smaller sugarcane farmers planted sugarcane, and after harvesting, they were sent here to process sugar on behalf of the sugarcane, and some of them jointly built a sugar liao to make sugar, but after all, not everyone can be a local fire master, and many sugarcane farmers are still willing to send sugarcane to Dahu and other well-crafted sugar liaos. Generally, the sugar liao will adopt the method of sharing the processing of incoming materials: the sugar liao is divided into 40%, the cane farmers are divided into 60%, and in some places they pay for processing, and the products are all owned by the cane farmers, and the cost on both sides is about the same.

The place where the sugar is made, according to several workers, is whether it is produced in the sugar house. It is still commissioned by cane farmers for processing, and most of them are finally shipped directly to Houyu Port. The sugar shops there will buy it in a unified manner. And now there is more than one sugar store in Houyu Port, but the business is the same, specializing in the export of local sugar, and bags of sugar are shipped out of Houyu Port, some go to Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in the north, and some are sent to the Wa Kingdom and Nanyang!

"How much money can sugar farmers net if they keep growing sugarcane like this?" Geng Jingzhong is the most curious about this.

"One acre can net six big silver dollars!" One worker said that he had no land of his own and was very envious of the sugar farmers. "Even if you call for taxes, you can still have a lot of money left, which is much better than our busy work day and night!"

As soon as he heard this, Geng Jingzhong began to pay attention to this sugar industry, and the profiteering industry now belongs! Such huge benefits can be produced in such a humble workshop, and if you want to die to find a way to improve this sugar making process, you will surely make more profits in the future!

Now Geng Jingzhong also has a better understanding of the situation here, such as the place in front of him, which is a typical combination of Zhuangliao and Liao, and there is no Tutangliao that is purely engaged in processing. All of them are set up by a sugarcane farmer or landlord with more sugarcane fields and attached to the sugarcane farm, and there are also sugarcane farmers who jointly set up a business, and the Da Niu family is also a small landlord! Tutangliao mainly processes sugarcane produced in its own field, and takes into account external processing. The utilization rate of the equipment is very low, so all of them are small in scale and poorly equipped.

Sugarcane planting is not a common tenant system in rural areas, and small plots of land are planted and harvested by the sugarcane farmers themselves, and a few short-term workers are hired when the farm is busy; The large pieces were completely planted and managed by long-term laborers hired by the landlords, and there was already a rudimentary form of agricultural hired labor. Therefore, once the land changes hands, all the labor force on the land will disappear, which is completely different from changing the landlord and not the tenant under the general tenancy system, which puts forward an urgent demand for supplementary labor.

Leaving from Tangliao, Geng Jingzhong refused Dahu's enthusiastic invitation to stay and finish eating, and left in a hurry. "Uncle Gu, let's go back and buy some sugarcane fields to expand the plantation!"

"The prince also wants to make sugar?!" Gu Ping wondered.

"Yes, maybe I can make sugar like an ice cube!" Geng Jingzhong said with a smile!

Gu Ping's eyes widened suddenly, this prince had only visited the sugar house for the first time, had he learned everything? And what can be done better? To be honest, he didn't believe it in his heart!

"I want to build a plantation," Geng Jingzhong said, "Uncle Gu, you haven't noticed that the business model of this small sugarcane village is too small-scale farmer, as I told you before, and I feel that their planting and management level is too backward." "In the case of a cash crop like sugarcane, the best way to do it is to plant it on a large scale: combine these small plots of land into one large sugarcane plantation. It would be better to use a wage system, which would be much more productive than the smallholder farming seen today.

Just do it, this day's play, has made the body exhausted, but also watched more than two hours of interesting sugar production process, but also discovered the production of cane sugar this profiteering industry, in a good mood, and the guards quickly whipped, more than 30 miles away, only one and a half hours back to the palace. Immediately, Geng Jingzhong recorded all the thoughts in his head and prepared to improve them later. (To be continued......)