Chapter 504 Sugar!
"Is this sugar? The taste is wrong." Lulos once again pinched a handful and put it into her mouth. "This taste, hmm, is pure enough."

The evening breeze blew the curtains. In the tea room on the second floor, three people in charge of the area around Langsander County gathered in front of a round table.

They each took a pinch and put it in their mouths to savor it carefully, and expressions of surprise appeared on their faces.

This is too sweet. You know, even the purest brown sugar on the market has a hint of bitterness and choking 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 taste the faint taste of impurities in it.

Those bakers and pastry chefs will go crazy for this candy.

Lulos and Ludvik looked at each other, not hiding their surprise and curiosity at all.

"Where did you get such white sugar?"

Although Lulu was surprised by the whiteness of the sugar, if you look closely, you will find that the so-called "white sugar" is actually slightly yellowish.

In modern technology, there are two most critical steps in purifying white sugar from the red and black raw cane sugar syrup.

The first is color absorption, which is to use activated carbon and color absorbent to absorb the color in brown sugar and black sugar, that is, the impurities at the chemical level.

The second is to separate molasses, which is to separate molasses, which is an impurity of sucrose, from real granulated sugar (pure sugar) on a physical level, 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 countless times better than the brown sugar and black sugar sold on the market.

As early as a year ago, when Horn was still living in Jeanne d'Arc, he accidentally developed a method of making white sugar - the slime sugar method.

At that time, he thought that this method could not be operated by himself, so instead of keeping it in his hands, he planned to sell it to a big shot in exchange for start-up capital.

He never imagined that after suppressing others, 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 black sugar and brown sugar. "This is the method I developed to purify brown sugar."

"You mean you want to make money from this?" Lulos was forty-one years old, at the age of being greedy, and she ate all the white sugar on the plate.

Horn wanted to remind her to be careful about tooth decay, but he held back and asked, "How much do you think we should price this brown sugar?"

"Five hundred dinars?"

"No, 12 dinars. No matter how high or low the price of brown sugar is, I will sell it at the highest market price."

"Why?" Ludvik obviously didn't understand the logic, but he was not ashamed to ask the young man.

“First, our production costs are much lower than those of other companies. Our goal is to ensure internal economic circulation, and our requirements for profits are not so crazy.

Second, in this way, we can defeat the empire's high-end sugar market and acquire and control sugar workshops and sugar and oil shops through Gongyou Holding Company and Fran Trading Company.

Then we can monopolize the high-end sugar market in the empire and form a sugar trust. Then we will have the power to set prices, and monopoly will be the most profitable. "

This proposal was put forward by Catherine at an internal seminar, and she guaranteed that the trust could be run well with the help of the Holy Maiden Bank.

For Catherine, this is something she has done a lot in Rapid City.

"So what you mean is that we use grain to exchange for brown sugar from Black Snake Bay, purify and process it in Langsand County, and then sell it to Fran through Kasha County?" Ludwick's eyes lit up.

If this is true, then most of Kasha County’s problems will be solved immediately.

Sugar, like spices, was in short supply in the imperial market.

Although it is not as popular as spices, it is definitely ten or even nine times easier to sell than grain.

As for profits, the Megedi Chamber of Commerce even sent someone 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 bag, the price is between 2 and 6 dinars.

As for purified brown sugar, the price is even more expensive, about 10-12 dinars, and the price increases the further inland you go.

A gallon (about nine pounds) of grain cost only half to one dinar, which means that a pound of sugar is equivalent to hundreds of pounds of grain.

If you save some money, hundreds of pounds of grain are enough for a family to eat for a month. According to Catherine, most of the sugar is imported from the Lilac Corridor and the Golden Horn in southern France.

But these two places do not produce sugar. The real production areas are two: one is the Flesh and Blood Royal Court in the west, and the other is the Green Dragon Forest area.

The Blood and Flesh Royal Court can produce brown sugar, while the Green Dragon Forest can produce black sugar. Currently, 90% of the sugar on the market comes from these two places.

Black Snake Bay is just northeast of Green Dragon Forest, and if divided geographically the two can even be considered the same area.

Since the Green Dragon Forest can produce crops that produce sugar, why can't the Black Snake Bay?
The only question is, what exactly is this sugar-producing crop?
If this problem is not solved, then all that has come before will be in vain, but Horn believes that a crop that can produce so much sugar cannot be grown on a small scale.

So this must be a not uncommon creature.

"I've also asked the Flame Rose Society and Catherine, and they don't know where this sugar comes from." Horn turned his body and looked directly at the white-haired loli with twin ponytails 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. No, I think it is this."

Lulos uttered a string of strange syllables.

Horn didn't understand and was still looking at her in confusion.

She explained: "This is the Aboriginal language of the Black Snake Bay people, which means sweet tree. It is a tree that matures in three to five years, but its branches and leaves contain sweet water.

The natives would cut off the branches and leaves, wrap them in cloth, and beat them with stone hammers.

By filtering out the wood residue and impurities, you can get fresh sweet water.

When the sweet water dries up, there will be a layer of black and red solidified substance, which should be what you call brown sugar and black sugar. "

After that, she tasted the brown sugar and black sugar on the plate and said, "Hmm, this is the taste."

"Then why is there a famine if the people in Black Snake Bay can drink sugar water every day?" Ludvik was a little puzzled.

“This tree is very hard, who has the teeth to do it? You have to take it down and use a stone mill to squeeze it, and only after squeezing it can you get sweet water.

This sweet water burns the throat after drinking, and drinking too much will cause diarrhea. It’s not that no one has tried to use it as a staple food.

But in the end we found that we were still hungry, our limbs became too weak to hammer the sweet branches, and we slowly starved to death. "

After spitting out her tongue that was disgusted by the brown sugar, Lulos patted the powdered sugar in her hand, took a sip of red tea, and slumped down in the soft chair.

Horn laughed and said that if one drinks sugary water every day without supplementing other nutrients, it would be strange if he doesn't get sick.

But the sweet branches they picked could be exchanged for food, and eating this food would not keep them from starving to death.

10 pounds of sweet tree branches can produce 2 pounds of brown sugar, which can be exchanged for one month's food rations. The people of Black Snake Bay are definitely 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 it down in the small notebook, Horn looked up again and asked impatiently.

"With the leaves, each tree can produce about 30 or 35 pounds? It won't be less than this number. This thing grows fast and will grow back in half a year.

As for the number of trees per acre, I haven’t calculated it, maybe three or four hundred? I’ll have to calculate it after I get back.”

Jotting down a number on the manuscript, Horn turned his body toward Ludwig.

"Dean Ludwick, how many tons, I mean how many dan of grain, do you export to the Leia Church every year?"

"I haven't done a careful count, but it should be around 250 million dan."

Horn silently calculated in his mind that 250 million dan was approximately 13 tons of grain. With the 8 tons of grain from Langsander County, the total amount was 21 tons.

According to the price ratio of grain and brown sugar, Black Snake Bay only needs to provide raw materials enough to produce 4200 tons of sugar.

"4200 tons, which is more than 8 dan of brown sugar, or about 800 million pounds of brown sugar." Horn turned to Lulos again, "Can you produce so much brown sugar? Do you have so many sweet trees?"

"The area of ​​Black Snake Bay is twice that of Thousand River Valley, and two-thirds of it is forest. One acre of land can produce tens of thousands of pounds of sweet twigs a year. What do you think?" Lulos asked back, "I would like to ask, do you have the ability to process these 4200 tons of brown sugar?"

(End of this chapter)