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    Mechanical demucilaging

    The washed process.

    THE PROCESS IN MOTION

    How is mucilage removed mechanically?

    Start the scene or choose a stage. The animation simplifies the mechanism; what follows gives the details and the available references.

    Pulp dry, within six hours

    The pulper pinches the ripe cherry and separates skin and pulp, 43.6% of the fruit, without water. A grate with 7 to 8 mm bars, the zaranda, rejects the unpulped fruit. The beans come out covered in mucilage, 14.9% of the fruit: a sweet flesh in gel form, stuck to the parchment.

    Read the stages without animation
    1. Pulp dry, within six hoursThe pulper pinches the ripe cherry and separates skin and pulp, 43.6% of the fruit, without water. A grate with 7 to 8 mm bars, the zaranda, rejects the unpulped fruit. The beans come out covered in mucilage, 14.9% of the fruit: a sweet flesh in gel form, stuck to the parchment.
    2. In the column, the bean rises and the water descendsAn auger pushes the beans to the bottom of a column where a ribbed rotor turns. Mucilage is pseudoplastic: the more it is sheared, the more fluid it becomes. Shearing and bean-against-bean impacts detach the gel in a few seconds. A little water enters from the top, counter-current: the bottom of the column detaches, the top rinses.
    3. The honey comes out whole, the bean comes out cleanNothing has fermented: the pectin leaves the bean as it is, in the form of concentrated honey, and goes with the water to the pulp screw and then to the compost. The clean parchment coffee goes straight to the dryer, down to 10 to 12% moisture, and is never submerged while waiting.
    4. Adjust every week, or tear the parchmentAdjustment is made by coffee flow rate, stopwatch in hand, and checked every week because the size of the fruit drifts. Too aggressive, and the rotor tears the parchment and damages the bean. Two other losses do not come from the machine: green cherries, with 30% of cups rejected from just 2.5% of the lot, and waiting under water before drying.

    To remember: The mechanical demucilager waits for nothing and degrades nothing: it tears off the mucilage by friction, in a few seconds and with very little water. It comes after the pulper and does not remove the parchment.

    In history: Cenicafé developed BECOLSUB and then Ecomill; the first settings also fed criticism about quality.

    Read the full article and its sources ↓
    FamilyThe washed process
    Also known asdemucilager, desmucilaginado mecánico, café desmielado, remoción mecánica del mucílago, Becolsub, aquapulpa, forced demucilaging, most often sold under the simple name of washed, sometimes fully washed, which the trade disputes

    Where it is practiced

    Colombia is its home. Cenicafé, the research center of the National Federation of Coffee Growers, developed the DESLIM demucilager and the Becolsub module there. The acronym reads Beneficio ECOLógico con manejo de SUBproductos, meaning ecological processing with by-product management. The name already says the essential: the machine is worth something only when coupled with the treatment of pulp and water. Cenicafé dates the launch of the technology to 1995.

    In 2011, Cenicafé counts about 15,000 units of all capacities in service in the country. Nearly half of national production then goes through this route, or more than 80% adoption among potential users. The same publication indicates that the technology has been exported to the Americas, Asia and Africa. In 2013, Cenicafé notes that it is used in Colombia and in other countries producing washed milds.

    Brazil uses it with Pinhalense machines, for pulped natural (cereja descascado, in Portuguese) and for honey. The forerunner of the genre, the aquapulpa, was a machine designed for canephora, built up to the 1980s by several manufacturers. This last lineage rests on a single source, and the gray-area note says why it remains fragile.

    Four cylinder pulpers and their spare parts photographed together on a light background.
    Group of English-made cylinder pulpersWilliam H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 1922 · Public domain

    The principle

    Mucilage is the layer of sweet flesh stuck to the parchment, the envelope that surrounds the bean. On the Colombia variety, Cenicafé puts it at 14.85% of the fresh fruit's weight, against 43.58% for the pulp. It contains, in decreasing order of mass:

    • water;
    • total sugars and reducing sugars;
    • fibers and pectins, the chains that make it hold as a gel;
    • proteins, lipids and ash.

    The classic washed process degrades it on the spot. Bacteria, yeasts and enzymes transform the pectins and sugars into alcohols and carboxylic acids. The degradation is slow and measurable. Puerta followed these kinetics at ambient temperature: at twenty hours, 15.9% of the initial reducing sugars are fermented and 20% of the total sugars degraded. Rinsing then carries everything away.

    Mechanical demucilaging degrades nothing, it tears off. Mucilage is strongly pseudoplastic, that is, its viscosity drops when it is sheared harder. Oliveros and Gunasekaran attribute this behavior to two joint causes. The structure of the gel is destroyed under tension and shear forces. The particles also tend to align in the main direction of flow. A rotor stirs the suspension formed by the mucilage, the added water and the pulp debris. The shear stresses and the impacts between beans detach the layer in a few seconds.

    Two consequences matter more than the mechanism. The pectin leaves the bean whole, in the form of concentrated honey, and not in the form of fermentation acids. None of the tank's reactions takes place.

    The sequence

    • Harvest ripe cherries only. From 2.5% of green cherries in the lot, at least 30% of the cups are rejected, whatever the process used to remove the mucilage. Green fruit does not pulp completely, and on drying gives vinegary (vinagre, in Spanish) and black beans. Cenicafé's trials start from raw material held under 5% of fruit attacked by the borer, under 2% of immature fruit and under 2% of dry fruit.
    • Separation of floaters at the cherry stage, before pulping. Cenicafé uses a siphon tank or a hydraulic separator with hopper and auger. The operation removes dry, empty and borer-attacked fruit, as well as light and heavy impurities. Doing this separation upstream keeps these fruits from entering the circuit and loading the water.
    • Pulping without water, within six hours of reception. Two reasons add up. The fermented defect (fermento, in Spanish) sets in even before the demucilager. The apparent viscosity of the mucilage also increases with the delay between harvest and processing. The authors link this rise to the concentration of tannins. The machine then works a tougher material. Dry pulping alone avoids 72% of the process's pollution.
    • Sieve after the pulper (zaranda, in Spanish). It is a circular grate with bars, with an opening of 7 to 8 mm, that removes unpulped fruit and pieces of pulp. Cenicafé installs it in its own trials.
    • The 1999 manual recommends deepening by 1 mm the channels of the pechero, the plate against which the cherry is pressed in the pulper. The beans circulate more freely and mechanical damage falls. The sieve described in the previous point shows that Cenicafé then prefers to reject unpulped fruit rather than entrust it to the demucilager.
    • Dry feeding of the demucilager, by auger. Cenicafé developed a pulper with a volumetric screw doser to guarantee a fruit flow within the desired range. Few coffee growers use it, which explains the frequency of poor calibrations.
    • Passage through the chamber. The DESLIM is an upflow demucilager: the bean rises, the water descends. The bottom of the chamber demucilages, the upper part rinses.
    • Recommended water flow per module, expressed according to capacity in cherry coffee. Cenicafé gives ranges, not single values, because the flow must follow the actual coffee flow:
    • module 300: 0.70 to 1.00 L/min;
    • module 600: 1.40 to 2.00 L/min;
    • module 1,000 or 1,200: 2.80 to 4.00 L/min;
    • module 2,500: 5.60 to 8.00 L/min.
    • Calibration by coffee flow, by timing the filling of a container. Cenicafé asks that the calibration be checked every week. The reason is concrete: fruit size varies with the age of the plot, the variety and the agronomic management, so the flow drifts.
    • Immediate drying down to 10 to 12% moisture on a wet basis. Cenicafé dries in a static-bed silo, with a mean air temperature below 50 °C. The coffee already leaves the machine washed and can go directly to the dryer.
    • If drying cannot start right away, keep the coffee in a tank without water, fourteen hours at most, then rinse it with clean water before drying. Never submerge it. The cup entry gives the figures behind this rule.
    • Mixing of the mucilage water with the pulp in an auger, then a composting pit. This mixture retains 60 to 65% of the volume of water added and more than 50% of the honeys. It is this, not the machine, that brings pollution control to 90 or 91%.

    What it gives in the cup

    How Cenicafé scores. The scale has been published since 1996. Scores from 9 to 7 mean superior quality, from 6 to 4 tolerable quality, from 3 to 1 inferior quality. Knowing this scale changes how the results that follow are read.

    What is measured. Cenicafé compared the two routes on the 1995 and 1996 harvests, with the panels of Cenicafé, of the freeze-dried coffee plant in Chinchiná and of Almacafé in Bogota. The trial counts 77 beverage quality comparisons, and 127 attribute-by-attribute comparisons. Of these 127, 56 results favor the mechanical process, 40 show no difference, and 31 favor fermentation. The Cenicafé panel judged the DESLIM superior during the main harvest from August to December 1995. From January to June 1996, in a period of low harvest, the two routes gave cups scored 6 for the most part. That is the top of the tolerable band, just under the superior threshold. This conclusion comes from the body that designed the machine, and the three panels belong to the same Federation.

    Puerta (2000) ran 62 treatments through both routes, mixing ripe and green cherries. The mean cup rejection, all mixes combined, is 49.5% in natural fermentation against 45.7% in mechanical demucilaging. Body stayed good up to 2% of green in mechanical, against 1% in fermentation. Bitterness degraded more in fermentation. The aromas did not differ between the two routes at equal green content. Neither process makes up for a badly picked harvest.

    What waiting before drying costs. Cenicafé compared three management practices after a properly calibrated DESLIM. Immediate drying gives 100% of cups scored above 5. Coffee left without water for twelve to fourteen hours gives 95%. Coffee immersed for the same time gives only 75%. No cup in the trial carried the fermented defect or the dirty defect (sucio, in Spanish), and the yield at hulling (trilla, in Spanish) remained statistically identical in the three cases. The loss is therefore played out on the overall score, not on a frank defect.

    A recent point of comparison. On the finca Las Brisas, lots fermented thirteen hours then mechanically washed in the Ecomill exceeded 77.0 on the SCAA scale, some 80.0. The result concerns a mechanical wash after fermentation, not a raw demucilaging: it does not transpose as is.

    What is claimed without a published trial. Two opposite claims circulate: that the machine cleans the cup, and that it amputates its complexity. I found no blind trial, run by a panel independent of the Colombian industry, isolating the effect of the process on the acidity and complexity of a specialty lot. A trade guide describes a cleaner and sometimes less complex result: this is a trade observation, not a measurement.

    What the market says. In 2013, Cenicafé presented Ecomill. This system mechanically washes a coffee whose mucilage was first degraded, by natural fermentation of 14 to 20 hours or by pectinolytic enzymes. The Avance Técnico that describes it gives three reasons, and all three must be cited:

    • Colombian coffee growers who work with natural fermentation;
    • foreign buyers who demand coffee processed by natural fermentation;
    • decree 3930 of 2010, which strongly limits the point-source discharges allowed.

    The regulatory reason therefore weighs as much as buyer demand, and a reading that retained only the second would be tendentious. It remains that the body that promoted mechanical removal then designed a machine for those who do not want it. This fact says nothing about the cup, it says what the market and the law ask for. Moreover, some markets and some contracts distinguish fully washed from washed obtained by mechanical removal.

    Two clarifications of vocabulary. The word anaerobic does not apply here: there is neither a closed tank nor an oxygen-depleted environment, only a few seconds of passage through an open machine. And the machine can be set to remove only part of the mucilage, which industrially produces the yellow and red honeys in Brazil. These colors are standardized by no body, and two producers do not call the same thing red honey.

    Two-body machine mounted on a cast-iron frame, with loading hopper, large flywheel and belts.
    English-made tandem pulperWilliam H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 1922 · Public domain

    What goes wrong

    • Peeled bean. Underfeeding the machine lengthens the bean's residence time in the chamber, which increases the stress it undergoes and tears off the parchment. The module manual puts it in one sentence: less coffee in the DESLIM means an increase in the hulling of the bean. The defect is visible on the parchment coffee (pergamino, in Spanish) and is found again in the green.
    • Traces of mucilage. A coffee flow that is too high shortens the residence time below the recommended value, and the layer is not entirely removed. Cenicafé names the two consequences: stained parchment coffee and the fermented defect in the cup. Drying over it discolors the parchment, slows the drying, and also gives the dirty defect.
    • Not all demucilagers are equal. A bar-rotor device removes at best only about 80% of the mucilage, against more than 98% for a DESLIM. It therefore does not allow immediate drying and requires several hours in the tank, then two rinses. Its specific consumption is 2.8 L per kg of dry parchment coffee. Mechanical does not mean without fermentation: it depends on the rotor. The 98% threshold moreover assumes a module fitted with Colmecano-type agitators.
    • Named defects that follow, in increasing severity. The Colombian trade calls them thus:
    • agrio, the sour;
    • fruta, the excessive fruitiness that turns;
    • cebolla, the onion;
    • rancio, the rancid;
    • stinker, the foul-smelling, the last stage.
    • Delay in drying. Cenicafé's trial quantifies the loss: beyond fourteen hours of waiting, and above all under water, the overall score falls. Immersion also worsens the environmental balance. It produces 8% more total solids than dry storage, and a chemical oxygen demand about 10% higher. Waiting therefore costs twice, in the cup and in pollutant load.
    • Increased pollution. Three conditions tip the balance: a badly designed machine, a flow exceeding 1.0 L of water per kg of dry parchment coffee, unmanaged pulp and residues. The mechanism is explicit in Cenicafé. Beyond this flow, the pulp no longer retains the honeys and is washed in turn. Pollution then exceeds that of a well-run conventional treatment. The machine alone is not an environmental gain.
    • Energy cost, rarely cited. Cenicafé compares the specific power of the washing routes. The Becolsub 2,500 module consumes 6.22 W.h per kg of washed coffee. Tank washing with a submersible pump consumes 1.00, and the Ecomill 3,000 only 0.58. Mechanical demucilaging is therefore, in this table, the route most hungry for energy per kilogram washed. It trades water for electricity, and this trade is worth stating.
    • Mechanical damage. It remains low when the machine is calibrated. Ecomill washers derived from the DESLIM measure 0.10 to 0.56% in trials, and 0.26% on average on commercial farms. On seed, passage through the demucilager costs about 1.1% of germination.
    • What this process does not risk. Overfermentation belongs to the other route, and it is the main argument for the mechanical process. The argument is solid, but the threshold is not a fixed duration. Cenicafé places the end of fermentation at 15.0 hours on average without prior sorting, and 16.3 hours with sorting. The fermented defect appears three to six hours after this end. The mass in the tank heats up to 14 °C above ambient, which shifts the deadline. A watch alone is therefore not enough, and it is indeed this management risk that the machine removes.

    Benchmarks

    • Mucilage, Colombia variety14.85% of the fresh fruit's weight, against 43.58% for the pulp
    • Mucilage removed, correct water and coffee flowsmore than 98%
    • Water, tank washing with manual agitation4.17 L per kg of dry parchment coffee
    • Water, tank washing with a 2 hp submersible pump6.0 L per kg of dry parchment coffee
    • Water, Becolsub module0.7 to 1.0 L per kg of dry parchment coffee
    • Water, Ecomill 1,500 and 3,0000.4 and 0.5 L per kg of dry parchment coffee
    • Specific power6.22 W.h/kg for Becolsub 2,500, 1.00 in a tank with a pump, 0.58 for Ecomill 3,000
    • Dry pulping alone72% of the pollution avoided
    • Mixing water and pulp60 to 65% of the added volume retained, more than 50% of the honeys, 90 to 91% of the pollution controlled
    • End of natural fermentation15.0 h without sorting, 16.3 h with sorting
    • Fermented defectthree to six hours after the end of fermentation
    • Drying10 to 12% moisture wet basis, air under 50 °C on average
    • Tolerable wait before dryingfourteen hours at most, without water, with rinsing
    • Cenicafé cup comparisons 1995-199656 for mechanical, 40 null, 31 for fermentation
    • Colombian installed base in 2011about 15,000 units, nearly half of national production
    Gray areaThe water volume of the traditional route remains the most uncertain point of this sheet. An earlier version put forward 40 to 45 L per kg of dry parchment coffee. I did not find this figure in a readable Cenicafé source. The figures that Cenicafé publishes for washing range from 4.17 to 20 L per kg of dry parchment coffee, and its comparison table retains 4.17 for tank washing with manual agitation and 6.0 for tank washing with a submersible pump. The Becolsub's gain over tank washing is therefore a factor of four to twenty, not forty. The figure of 40 L probably circulates because it targets the whole traditional treatment, hydraulic transport and water pulping included, and not washing alone. For lack of a source read, the sheet does not take it up. The share of mucilage was corrected. An earlier version gave 22% of the pulped coffee, with no source found. Cenicafé publishes 14.85% of the fresh fruit for the mucilage and 43.58% for the pulp on the Colombia variety. Related to the pulped coffee, these figures give about 26%, not 22%. The two do not reconcile, and the sheet retains the sourced values. The thickness of the mucilage on the bean, often cited as 0.4 mm on the flat face and 2.0 mm on the rounded face, does not appear in the summary of the 1994 rheological study. It was removed from the benchmarks field for lack of a source read. Several machine parameters come only from the manufacturer's manual and could not be cross-checked with Cenicafé: the rotor speed of 870 rpm, the oblong holes of 3.2 mm by 20 mm in the camisa, and the flow check after five minutes of running. The 3.2 mm figure invites caution: 3.18 mm, or one eighth of an inch, appears in Cenicafé as the diameter of a water-regulating orifice plate, in a role unrelated to this one. The confusion is possible. The threshold of 1,500 rpm beyond which detachment would slow down, and the designation of rotor Cenicafé III, could not be rechecked. An earlier version explained this slowing by the alignment of the beans with the tangential flow. This alignment is indeed described by the rheological study, but there it explains the pseudoplasticity of the mucilage, not the rarefaction of bean-to-bean impacts. The explanation was removed. The name of the modules varies from one Cenicafé publication to another. Avance Técnico 388 lists 100, 300, 600, 1,000 and 2,500. Avance Técnico 405 lists 300, 600, 1,200 and 2,500. Speaking of four sizes built in Colombia is therefore approximate. The launch date and the installed base were corrected. An earlier version gave a commercial introduction in 1996 and a program of 17,000 new beneficiaderos in four years. Cenicafé writes that the launch dates from 1995, and counts about 15,000 units in service in 2011. The figure of 17,000 was not found. The spread of Penagos machines in India, Peru and Central America likewise has no source read, and the sheet sticks to the export to the Americas, Asia and Africa that Cenicafé mentions. The precise conditions for ochratoxin A production, often cited as a bean held for four days between 16 and 30% moisture and between 25 and 28 °C, rest on no mycotoxicological source in this sheet. The risk of delayed drying is real and documented elsewhere, but the numerical window was removed from the risks field until a first-rank source is read. I still found no blind trial that isolates the process on specialty lots, with a panel outside the Colombian industry. On the other hand, the scoring scale does exist and has been published since 1996, contrary to what an earlier version of this sheet claimed. Cenicafé's 127 comparisons remain the most solid data, and they come from the inventor of the process. Manufacturers do not quantify water on the same basis. Cenicafé counts in liters per kg of dry parchment coffee. Penagos announces 0.2 L per kg of cherry coffee for the UCBE range. About five kg of cherry are needed for one kg of dry parchment coffee. The two numbers therefore cannot be compared as printed. I found no Penagos figure brought back to parchment coffee. The Penagos patent announces 0.16 L per kg without specifying which kg is meant, and its page did not respond during this check. Pinhalense publishes the model names DMPE-0, DMPE-3 and DMPE-5. The capacities and water flows are in technical data sheets that I could not read. The history of the aquapulpa rests on a single trade press article. It gives its canephora origin, more than 4 m³ of water per tonne of wet parchment, and up to 10 hp per tonne. It is signed by a consultant long tied to the trade in processing machines. Neither a date of first manufacture, nor an original manufacturer, nor independent confirmation was found. It is also not known whether aquapulpa is a brand or a generic name. Cenicafé asserts that mechanical removal gives a higher yield, because it avoids the loss of about 1.5% of dry matter due to the bean's respiration during fermentation. Puerta's 2000 trial found no statistically significant difference in yield between the two routes at equal green content. The 2009 trial on management after demucilaging likewise finds statistically identical yields at hulling. The claims could not be reconciled. Two first-rank sources remain inaccessible. The first is Avance Técnico no. 216 by Oliveros and Roa, 1995, the founding publication on mechanical demucilaging. The second is the work by Roa et al. of 1999 itself, of which only sections cited by other publications could be read. Cenicafé article 58(2) of 2007 was read only through the summary given by Avance Técnico 388. The server www.cenicafe.org refused the connection during this check, but the digital library biblioteca.cenicafe.org responded and supplied Avances Técnicos 388, 405 and 432 in full text. == The purely enzymatic route exists, and the obstacle is not technical Mechanical demucilaging removes the mucilage by friction. There is a third route, neither microbial nor mechanical, that this sheet does not mention and that is commercialized: removing the mucilage with enzymes that are bought and dosed, without waiting for microorganisms to make them. Hackler and Särchen devote a page to it and name four families. - Pectinases: They cut the pectins, that is, the network that makes the mucilage hold like a jelly. They are the main ones, and their common industrial use is the clarification of fruit juices, where they do exactly the same work on the same class of molecules. - Amylases: They cut complex sugars into simple sugars, which frees assimilable matter and makes the medium more fluid. - Proteases: They cut the proteins of the mucilage, which represent nearly nine percent of the dry mass, a share largely ignored when only pectin is discussed. - Lipases: They degrade lipids and take part in the transformation of aroma compounds, which makes them interesting for something other than mere detachment. The economic reasoning is given explicitly by the authors, and it is the most useful point for this sheet. Pectinases are commonly used in the juice industry, they can be used and are used for coffee, but their price confines them to small scale and excludes them from mass production. The obstacle to the purely enzymatic route is therefore not technical, it is a matter of price. This is valuable information, because it makes it possible to predict what will happen if the price of these enzymes falls, which production by industrial fermentation makes plausible. Two suppliers of blends intended to suppress microbial fermentation in favor of a controlled reaction are named, Sunson Enzymes Biotechnology and Kerry under the Enmex brand. The sales argument is stated bluntly: microorganisms, especially in complex communities, inevitably produce metabolites liable to harm quality, for example by discoloring the green coffee. The producer who buys an enzyme does not buy an acceleration, he buys the removal of chance. What this argument passes over in silence must be said at once, and it is the counterpart that the whole rest of the site documents: the same complex communities also produce the esters, alcohols and aldehydes that make a fermented coffee interesting. A pure enzymatic route removes the risk and the benefit together. In this it comes close to mechanical demucilaging, whose purpose it shares, with the difference that it works by chemistry rather than by abrasion, and therefore without breakage or heating of the bean. What is missing to evaluate this route is a trial comparing, on a single lot, mechanical demucilaging, enzymatic removal and spontaneous fermentation, with metabolite measurements and a blind panel. The site also has, in sheet 18, a European evaluation of an endo-polygalacturonase, which is a pectinase: it is the only regulatory entry point it has on this route. Sources of this passage: Hackler and Särchen, chapter 4, p. 50. European evaluation of an endo-polygalacturonase: sheet 18.
    Roa G., Oliveros C.E., Álvarez J., Ramírez C.A., Sanz J.R., Dávila M.T., Álvarez J.R., Zambrano D.A., Puerta G.I., Rodríguez N., “Beneficio ecológico del café”, Chinchiná: Cenicafé, 1999, 273 p., English edition “Ecological processing of coffee at the farm level”: sections 3.8 to 3.8.6 for the DESLIM and its parameters, section 2.2.3 for organoleptic quality and the 127 comparisons, section 2.1.2.2 for the chemistry of fermentation, section I for water consumption and potential pollution; Oliveros T. C.E., Gunasekaran S., “Caracterización reológica del mucílago y de las suspensiones mucílago café en baba y mucílago café pergamino húmedo”, Cenicafé 45(4): 125-136, 1994, for the pseudoplastic character and the effect of the harvest-to-processing delay; Sanz U. J.R., Oliveros T. C.E., Ramírez G. C.A., López P. U., Velásquez H. J., “Controle los flujos de café y agua en el módulo Becolsub”, Avances Técnicos Cenicafé no. 405, March 2011, for the 1995 launch, the installed base, the 72% from dry pulping and the table of water flows; Pabón U. J.P., Sanz U. J.R., Oliveros T. C.E., “Manejo del café desmucilaginado mecánicamente”, Avances Técnicos Cenicafé no. 388, October 2009, for the three management practices after demucilaging, the COD and total solids tables, the yield at hulling and the flow ranges, full article in Cenicafé 59(3): 214-226, 2008; Oliveros T. C.E., Sanz U. J.R., Ramírez G. C.A., Tibaduiza V. C.A., “ECOMILL, tecnología de bajo impacto ambiental para el lavado del café”, Avances Técnicos Cenicafé no. 432, June 2013, pages 1 to 5, for the pulp and mucilage shares, the three reasons, the specific water volumes and the table of specific power; Mejía G. C.A., Oliveros T. C.E., Sanz U. J.R., Moreno C. E.L., Rodríguez H. L.A., “Evaluación del desempeño técnico y ambiental de un desmucilaginador de café con rotor de varillas”, Cenicafé 58(2): 122-133, 2007, read through the summary given by Avance Técnico 388; Peñuela M. A.E., Oliveros T. C.E., Sanz U. J.R., “Remoción del mucílago de café a través de fermentación natural”, Cenicafé 61(2): 159-173, 2010, for the durations of the end of fermentation and the delay before the fermented defect appears; Puerta-Quintero G.I., “Escala para la evaluación de la calidad de la bebida de café verde Coffea arabica, procesado por vía húmeda”, Cenicafé 47(4): 231-234, 1996, for the scoring scale; Puerta-Quintero G.I., “Influencia de los granos de café cosechados verdes, en la calidad física y organoléptica de la bebida”, Cenicafé 51(2): 136-150, 2000, materials and methods page 138, organoleptic results pages 139 to 141, rejections and yields pages 144 to 147; Puerta-Quintero G.I., Rios A. S., “Composición química del mucílago de café según el tiempo de fermentación y refrigeración”, Cenicafé 62(2): 23-40, 2011, for the composition; Puerta-Quintero G.I., “Cinética química de la fermentación del mucílago de café a temperatura ambiente”, Cenicafé 64(1): 42-59, 2013, for the degradation of sugars; Puerta-Quintero G.I., “Beneficie correctamente su café y conserve la calidad de la bebida”, Avances Técnicos Cenicafé no. 276, June 2000, sections “Haga bien las prácticas de beneficio” and “¿Cómo se afecta la calidad del café?”; Oliveros T. C.E., Sanz U. J.R., Ramírez G. C.A., “Separador hidráulico de tolva y tornillo sinfín”, Avances Técnicos Cenicafé no. 360: 1-8, 2007; Jotagallo, “Módulo de beneficio ecológico de café (Becolsub), manual”, data sheet DESLIM 300, 600, 1000 and 2500, and start-up procedure, points 4 and 6; patent US 8 722 125 B2, Penagos Hermanos y Cía. Ltda., “Apparatus and method for demucilating, cleaning and washing depulped coffee”, US filing 2011, Brazilian priority 2010, citation not rechecked in this passage; Penagos UCBE-5000 product sheet; Pinhalense product page, DMPE-0, DMPE-3 and DMPE-5 demucilagers; Brando C.H.J., “The impact of mucilage removers on coffee sustainability and quality”, 25 Magazine no. 6, Specialty Coffee Association; Café Imports, “Washed process” notice, paragraph on the distinction between fully washed and washed obtained by mechanical removal.
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