Poor-quality Brazilian Rio does not have the color the buyer expects. Walsh describes the palette of the trade: bone black, ground bone charcoal, to darken; lead chromate, a painter's yellow pigment, to gild; the two combined to obtain green. The motive is not to pass a bad coffee off as a good one but to flatter the regional prejudices of buyers, each port having its fetish hue.

Coffees from La Guaira, in Venezuela, are polished or soaped with soapstone to be sold as Rios: the adulteration does not go from bad to good, it goes toward what sells. Ukers completes the list of colorants used on green and roasted coffee to hide damaged beans: lead and zinc chromates, Prussian blue, ferric oxide, coal-tar dyes, fixed to the bean with adhesives.

Neither Thurber nor Walsh says what the lead did to the drinkers; they report it without dwelling on it. Detection is domestic: wash the beans in lukewarm water, rubbing, or cut a bean in two, the color of a dyed bean stopping at the skin.

Walsh 1894, p. 200; Ukers 1922, ch. XVII, p. 170; LC ch. 10

The name is worth more than the contents, and Mocha shows it. Walsh describes two workshop procedures for emptying a bale of its coffee without it showing.

First, stove-piping. An iron tube of the kind used for the sampling probe, the one normally used to check the goods, is driven into the bale. The real Mocha is drawn off, Santos, Maracaibo or Guatemala is poured in its place, and the hole is plugged. The tool of inspection became the tool of substitution without being altered.

Then steaming. The fibrous bindings of the bale are softened with steam, which allows it to be opened whole and then sewn up again without tearing.

Higher up the chain, Mocha is manufactured even before the workshop. Small beans from Wynaad, Malabar, Ceylon, Bourbon and Mauritius are shipped to Aden expressly to be converted into Mocha. The name is thus born in a transit port, from coffees that do not come from there.

In the United States, another practice targeted the appearance of Asian coffees. Javas and Mochas had fermented naturally in the holds of sailing ships, which gave them a particular brown, and this brown had come to be worth money. So coffee was “sweated” with steam to obtain it without the voyage.

The law finally named the thing. A federal trial, after the Pure Food Act, classed the process as adulteration and misbranding. A ruling of 1916 reserved the name Java for coffee grown on the island.

Walsh 1894, p. 108, 202-203; Ukers 1922, ch. XXIII, p. 337-338; LC ch. 10