CHAPTER 525: CHAPTER 503: SUGAR!

"Is this sugar? This taste isn’t right." Louise pinched another bit and sprinkled it into her mouth, "This taste, hiss, is pure enough."

The evening breeze fluttered the curtains, as the three leaders from near Langsande County gathered around the round table in the second-floor tea room.

Each of them pinched a bit and tasted it carefully, and a look of surprise blossomed on their faces.

This was too sweet, considering that even the purest brown sugar on the market always had a hint of bitterness and raw taste.

Yet this sugar was as soft as cashmere, melting instantly in the mouth. If not carefully tasted, one might barely notice the faint impurity flavor.

Bakers and confectioners would surely go crazy for this kind of sugar.

Louise and Ludvik exchanged a glance, unable to hide their astonishment and curiosity.

"Where did you get such white sugar?"

Although Louise was amazed at the whiteness of the sugar, upon close inspection, she would find that this so-called "white sugar" was slightly yellowish.

In modern techniques, refining white sugar from the original dark brown cane sugar syrup involves two critical steps.

The first is decolorization, using activated carbon and decolorizing agents to remove the color or chemical impurities from brown and dark sugar.

The second is separating the molasses, physically separating the molasses as an impurity from the real granulated sugar (pure sugar) using a centrifuge.

Horn couldn’t accomplish the second step, so he could only produce a simple version of white granulated sugar, or rather, yellow sugar.

Yet this was already countless times better than the brown and dark sugar sold on the market.

As early as a year ago, when Horn was still living under someone else’s roof in Joan of Arc Castle, he inadvertently discovered a method to create white sugar — the Slime Drip Sugar Technique.

At the time, he felt that this method wasn’t something he could handle on his own and intended to sell it to a big shot in exchange for startup capital.

What he never expected was that as time went on, he would become that big shot himself.

"We call this white granulated sugar, or yellow sugar," Horn snapped his fingers, signaling for more plates of brown and dark sugar to be brought, "This is the method I developed for refining brown sugar."

"You mean to make money from this?" Louise, 41years old and still with a sweet tooth, couldn’t stop eating the white granulated sugar from the plate.

Horn felt like reminding her about tooth decay, but he refrained, "What do you think we should price this yellow sugar at?"

"15 Dinars?"

"Wrong, 12 Dinars. Regardless of how high or low the price of brown sugar is, I will sell it at the highest market price of brown sugar."

"Why?" Ludvik obviously didn’t understand the logic, yet he wasn’t shy about asking the younger man.

"First, our production cost is far lower, aiming to ensure the internal economic cycle without being absolutely greedy for profit.

Second, in this way, we can crush the Empire’s high-end sugar market, acquiring and controlling sugar workshops and sugar oil shops through joint-stock companies and the Falan Trading Company.

Then we can monopolize the Empire’s high-end sugar market, forming a Sugar Trust, where we will have the pricing power, and monopoly makes the most profit."

This was proposed in an internal meeting by Catherine, and she assured that with the help of the Saintess Bank, this Trust could be operated well.

For Catherine, she had done such things many times in Rapids City.

"So you mean, exchange grain for dark sugar from Black Snake Bay, refine and process it in Langsande County, and sell it to Falan through Kasha County?" Ludvik’s eyes lit up.

If this were true, it would solve most of Kasha County’s problems.

Sugar, like spice, was in high demand in the Empire’s market.

Though not as prized as spice, it was surely ten, even nine times easier to sell than grain.

As for profits, the Meigedi Commerce Association had sent specialists to investigate and research.

Horn himself had bought sugar on the market, with the basic dark sugar costing about 2 to 6 dinars per pound at wholesale prices.

And as for refined brown sugar, the price was even higher, around 10-12 dinars, getting more costly further inland.

One gallon (about nine pounds) of grain was only half to one dinar, meaning a pound of sugar was equivalent to over a hundred pounds of grain.

If rationed properly, over a hundred pounds of grain could feed a family for a month.

According to Catherine, most sugar was imported from the southern Falan Clove Corridor and Golden Horn Bay.

But these two places didn’t produce sugar, the real production sites were two: the Blood and Flesh Royal Court in the west, and the Green Dragon Forest Sea region.

The Blood and Flesh Royal Court produced brown sugar, while the Green Dragon Forest Sea produced dark sugar; currently, 90% of the sugar in the market came from these two places.

Black Snake Bay was just northeast of Green Dragon Forest Sea, geographically, they could even be considered the same area.

Since the Green Dragon Forest Sea could produce sugar-producing crops, why couldn’t Black Snake Bay?

The only problem is, what exactly is this sugar-producing crop?

If this issue isn’t resolved, all previous talk is futile, but Horn believed that a crop capable of producing so much sugar couldn’t be small in scale.

So it must be a relatively common organism.

"I’ve also asked the Flame Rose Association and Catherine, they have no idea what the source of this sugar is?" Horn turned his body, looking straight at the white-haired twin-tailed girl in front of him.

The white-haired girl frowned, pondering for a long time before speaking:

"I don’t know what it is either, but I can more or less guess, no, I feel it’s this."

Louise uttered a string of strange syllables.

Horn didn’t understand and looked at her, puzzled.

She explained: "This is the indigenous language of the Black Snake Bay people, meaning sweet tree, a type of tree that matures in three to five years, with sweet sap in its branches and leaves.

Those indigenous people cut down the branches and leaves, wrap them in cloth, and beat them with a stone hammer.

By filtering out the wood chips and impurities, fresh sweet sap can be obtained.

After the sweet sap evaporates, there will be a layer of black-red solidified substance, which should be what you call brown sugar and dark sugar."

After speaking, she tasted a bit from the plates containing brown and dark sugar: "Hmm, that’s the taste."

"Then why do the Black Snake Bay people suffer from famine if they can drink sugar water every day?" Ludvik was a bit puzzled.

"This tree is very hard, who has the teeth for that? You must bring it down and crush it with a stone mill first before you get the sweet sap.

The sweet sap burns the throat when drunk, and drinking too much causes diarrhea. It isn’t that no one tried making it a staple food.

But eventually, we found that the stomach still felt hungry, people felt weak, unable to lift the sweet branches, and slowly starved to death."

Louise stuck out her tongue, disgusted by the brown sugar, clapped the sugar powder from her hands, sipped her black tea, and nestled into the soft chair.

Horn laughed; drinking sugar water without supplementing other nutrients daily, no wonder illnesses would occur.

Yet these harvested sweet branches could be traded for grain, and eating grain wouldn’t starve them.

pounds of sweet branches, which yield 2 pounds of dark sugar, exchangeable for a month’s rations, surely the Black Snake Bay people would be willing.

"What about the yield of this sweet tree, how much sweet branches can be produced annually? How many sweet trees can be planted per acre?" After noting it all down in a small notebook, Horn looked up, eagerly asking.

"With leaves included, each tree can yield about 30 or 35 pounds? Anyway, it wouldn’t be lower than that; it grows fast, regrowing in half a year.

As for per acre, I haven’t calculated, maybe three or four hundred trees? I’ll have to calculate this after I get back."

Noting down a figure in his manuscript, Horn turned to Ludvik.

"Dean Ludvik, how many tons of grain do you have to send to the Leia Church each year?"

"I haven’t kept a meticulous count, but it should be around 2.5 million piculs, give or take."

Horn silently calculated in his mind; 2.5 million piculs roughly equal 130,000 tons of grain, adding Langsande County’s 80,000 tons of grain amounts to 210,000 tons.

According to the grain and dark sugar price ratio, Black Snake Bay would have to provide raw materials for producing 4,200 tons of sugar.

"4,200 tons translate to over 80,000 piculs of dark sugar, roughly 800 million pounds of dark sugar," Horn turned to Louise again, "Can you produce that much dark sugar? Do you have that many sweet trees?"

"Black Snake Bay is twice the size of the Thousand River Valley, two-thirds of it is forest, with one acre producing over ten thousand pounds of sweet branches annually. What do you think?" Louise countered, "I’d like to ask, do you have the capacity to handle these 4,200 tons of dark sugar?"