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01 two roads
Coffee is a fruit, and a mill has to get the seed out of it.
The word on the bag describes how the fruit came off, and nothing else: washed means it came off first, in water, before drying began.
A coffee cherry is built in layers: a skin, a band of sweet pulp, then a thin, slippery, sugary coat called mucilage that clings to the seed. Under that is a stiff papery shell, the parchment, and inside it the seed, which is what gets roasted.
coffee/natural-process · the cherry, drawn in full →
There are two honest ways to get the seed out. Dry the whole cherry in the sun for weeks and crack the dried fruit off in one go: the natural, or dry, route. Or strip the fruit off while it is still wet, in a few hours, and dry only the bare parchment: the washed route, and the subject of this post.
The difference sounds procedural. It is not. In the dry route the seed spends weeks inside a fermenting fruit; in the washed route the fruit is gone before drying starts, so the seed dries alone. That is why a washed coffee is called clean and a natural fruity, and why a washed mill needs water, a tank, a channel and somewhere for the waste to go, while a dry patio needs sunshine.
Two numbers frame everything below. Of a hundred kilograms of cherry, about 2.6 end up as something a person actually consumes.1 And the fruit thrown away is not inert: pulp and mucilage are sugar, acid and pectin, and washed into a river they eat the oxygen out of it.
02 floating
The first thing a good mill does is throw part of the crop away.
A tank of water is the cheapest sorting machine there is, and almost nobody uses it.
Cherries are tipped into water before anything mechanical touches them. This is flotation: a ripe cherry is mostly water and sugar, denser than water, so it sinks. One that dried on the branch, was hollowed out by an insect called the coffee berry borer, or was picked green and never filled, holds air. It floats.
The floaters are skimmed off. That matters because an underdeveloped seed lacks the sugars to brown in a roaster, so it stays pale and tastes of paper, cereal or raw peanut. One of those in a cup is enough to notice.
Yet in a Colombian field study of seventy farms, only 6.9 percent sorted their cherries in water.3
For the enthusiast: what the sort is worth, and what skipping it does to the tank
How much is it worth? Less than you would hope, and more than the practice suggests. In the main harvest, when pickers are going through a field that is mostly ripe at once, immature fruit is generally under three percent of what comes in.2 That is a small share, but it is entirely defect and entirely removable, and it goes before any equipment, labour or water has been spent on it.
The study was Cenicafé’s, across seventy representative farms in four departments.3 It found a second-order effect too: skipping the sort shortened the fermentation stage by about 1.3 hours on average, because an unsorted mass is not the same material.3 A mill that skips the tank is not only keeping its defects, it is also making the next stage harder to time.
03 depulping
The pulper takes the fruit off and leaves the glue.
A machine strips two fifths of the cherry in one pass, and cannot touch the sticky coat underneath.
A pulper squeezes cherries between a rotating textured drum and a fixed plate, set just far enough apart that the seed slips through and the skin does not. Skin and pulp fall out of one side; the seeds, still in their parchment and still coated in mucilage, fall out of the other. It is the least mysterious operation in the whole chain, and the pulp it removes is about 41 percent of the cherry.2
What does not leave is the mucilage. It is not a syrup you can rinse off but a gel of pectin, the same family of molecule that sets jam, and it is bonded to the parchment. The pulper cannot take it off and neither can a hose.
where this post stopsWhether the pulper runs with water or dry changes the whole water bill; that is section 06. Leaving the coat on the seed on purpose is the honey route, a different post.
coffee/honey-process · leaving the coat on →
For the enthusiast: the mass balance, the caffeine, and what the coat is made of
Mucilage is 22 percent of the weight of depulped coffee and 13 percent of the weight of the whole cherry,2 which puts the depulped coffee at 59 percent of the cherry and the pulp at the remaining 41. In one pass the mill has separated out two fifths of everything it carried in, and it now has to put that somewhere.
Some of the coffee goes with it. A study that sampled every stage of a wet mill found that about 40 percent of the cherry’s caffeine leaves with the pulp.16 Caffeine is a defence compound and the fruit holds a lot of it, which is one reason pulp is a difficult thing to throw into a stream.
The coat is between 0.4 and 2 millimetres thick.3 Its solid framework is a cell wall: roughly 30 percent pectic substances, about 9 percent cellulose and about 15 percent other non-cellulosic sugars.8
04 the tank
The tank is a timer nobody can see.
Most of a day in which nothing visibly happens, and most of the quality of a washed coffee is either kept or lost.
Depulped coffee sits in a tank, usually concrete or tile, and waits. Microbes that were already on the fruit eat the sugars in the mucilage and make acids and alcohols, the tank turns sour, and the coat loosens until a rinse will take it off. Which microbes, in what order, and whether any of it reaches the seed is its own post.
coffee/fermentation · what is actually living in the tank →
For the wet route the tank is process control, and the only questions are how long, how you know, and what happens if you are wrong.
How a producer knows it is done.
There are two traditional tests. Push a stick into the coffee and pull it out: if the hole holds its shape, the coat has lost its stickiness. Or rub a handful of parchment between your palms until it stops slipping and squeaks like clean glass. Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research centre, timed both against the real endpoint. Both stop the tank with a quarter to nearly half of the coat still on; it is really off, above 97 percent, at about 15.5 hours.3
The instrument they built instead is almost comically simple: a perforated cone of coffee left in the tank, which reads how far the bed has settled as the coat drains away.3 With the cone, tanks ran 11.45 to 20 hours. With the growers’ own judgement, on the same coffee, they ran 10 to 72.3 That is the spread the tank has when nobody is measuring it.
For the enthusiast: the timings, the cone, and how accurate it is
The hole test called it at 7.29 hours on average, with about 58 percent of the mucilage actually removed. The rub test called it at 10.23 hours, with about 74 percent removed. True removal, above 97 percent, arrived at 15.5 hours plus or minus 0.9.3
As mucilage drains away the bed of coffee gets denser, from about 827 kilograms per cubic metre when freshly depulped to about 702 when washed, and it settles by 11.9 to 13.1 percent of its starting volume.3 So the cone is a perforated truncated cone holding half a litre of depulped coffee, left sitting in the tank. When the empty space above the coffee inside it passes 85 millimetres, more than 96 percent of the mucilage is gone. Across 45 controlled lots it landed at 96.7 percent with a standard error of 0.22, and in the field it called the point correctly in 97.1 percent of tests.3
Temperature sets the clock. Holding a tank at 15 degrees Celsius rather than letting it run at ambient stretched the process by more than 24 hours.5 A cold mill is a slow mill. This is one reason Kenya and Ethiopia ferment for a day or more while a warm Colombian tank is finished overnight, and why no mill can copy another mill’s schedule.
For the enthusiast: pH, the tank’s walls, and what really happens to the pectin
pH is a measure of acidity: the lower it is, the more acid. A field study across seven fermentation batches on four Nicaraguan farms found the tank starting at pH 5.5 to 5.7 and dropping sharply to about 4.6 as the process came to an end, with glucose falling throughout and either ethanol or lactic acid rising sharply at the finish.4 A controlled study on Colombian coffee ended lower again, below 3.5 in one treatment and close to 4.0 in another; the same study’s 15 degree tank ended at a different final pH from the ambient one.5 A third dataset, from a large trial covering both depulped and mechanically demucilaged coffee, starts higher, at pH 6.0 to 6.5, and falls to about 4.0 with the main drop after 36 hours.7 They agree on the direction and not on the numbers.
Even the tank’s building material shows up. In the Colombian field survey, stainless steel tanks ran slower than plastic ones, because steel conducts heat out through the walls and leaves the mass cooler.3
And the pectin is not doing what you would guess. The obvious story is that microbes secrete pectin-digesting enzymes and dissolve the coat. When somebody checked, that turned out to be mostly wrong. Comparing the cell wall polysaccharides of unfermented and 20-hour fermented beans, the bulk pectic material showed no apparent degradation. What changed was subtle: a slight drop in the pectins’ viscosity and average molecular weight, and partial de-esterification of the water-insoluble fraction. The authors concluded that removing mucilage by natural fermentation is the result of a restricted pectolysis whose mechanism remains to be worked out.8 The coat comes off, but not because it has been eaten.
The cost of being late.
Past the endpoint the tank buys nothing and costs a lot. More than two hours late is enough to start putting defects in the cup, the ones the Colombian trade calls vinagre and fermento.3 By 20 hours, vinegar and overripe pineapple are there to taste.2
For the enthusiast: how bad it gets, and the yield the tank costs
The overfermentation trials put numbers on the slide: at 40 hours, 37.5 percent of samples were graded fermented or stinker; past 64 hours, more than three quarters of the cups were called nauseous.2
There is a quieter cost as well. The seed is alive and breathing throughout, and a normal fermentation loses around 1.5 percent of the bean’s dry matter to respiration.2 That is yield, gone, in exchange for a coat coming loose.
The machine that skips the wait.
A mechanical demucilager removes the coat by force instead of by time: depulped coffee is pushed through a narrow gap against a fast rotor, and the beans scour each other clean in minutes. Cenicafé’s version, part of its Becolsub system, does the job on about 0.8 litres of water per kilogram.13
What it trades away is the open question of this post. Cenicafé’s own tasting panels found no quality advantage for the tank.2 The largest study to follow both routes end to end found they are not the same process: different microbes, different chemistry, different cups.7 Both things can be true: the machine will not make a worse coffee, and it will not make the same coffee.
My own reading is that the disagreement is mostly about what is being asked. Can a careful mechanical mill hit specialty grade? Yes, and that is settled. Does the tank add a character some buyers are paying for? It seems to, and nobody has quantified it well enough to price it.
For the enthusiast: the three studies behind that disagreement
Cenicafé’s comparison, using the sensory panels of the Colombian coffee federation, came down clearly: the samples tracked 1.81 to one in favour of the mechanical route, and the authors state categorically that fermentation does not influence the quality of the coffee relative to mechanical demucilaging.2 A separate controlled study found no significant quality difference between temperature-controlled and spontaneous fermentation either, with all treatments averaging above 82 points on the Specialty Coffee Association scale.5
Against that, the largest study to track both routes end to end found that mechanically demucilaged batches and depulped batches developed different microbial communities, different metabolite profiles and measurably different sensory results, with extended fermentation increasing fruity and acidic notes.7
05 the channel
Moving water rinses and grades at the same time.
The one stage where water is truly needed also sorts the coffee by weight, for free.
Once the coat has loosened it has to be washed off, classically in a washing channel: a long, shallow concrete run with water flowing down it. This is where the mucilage finally leaves the coffee, and the only stage in the wet route where water is genuinely indispensable.2
The second job comes free. Water in an open run moves fastest at the surface and slowest along the floor, so a dense seed sinks into the slow layer and lags while a light one rides high and is swept along. The batch sorts itself, heavy near the head and light at the tail. That is density grading, the float tank’s principle in a moving stream, and the heavy fraction is the first grade.
How the channel is built swings the water bill ninefold: about 39 litres per kilogram in an open channel with no reuse, 4.2 when the coffee is rinsed four times inside the tank instead.2 Section 06 has the whole bill.
For the enthusiast: the middle design, and why four rinses beat a running flow
A semi-submerged channel, which recirculates its water, does the same job at about 6.1 litres per kilogram of dry parchment coffee.2 Same coffee, same grading.
The four-rinse method has a second property that matters more than the volume. Fill the tank, stir hard, drain, and repeat three times: the first rinse carries 66 percent of the dissolved organic matter from the mucilage and the first two carry 90 percent.2 The pollution is concentrated into a small volume you can actually catch and treat, instead of diluted across forty litres you cannot.
Kenya, and the reason for doing it twice.
Kenya runs the most elaborate version of the wet route in commercial use: pulp, ferment, wash, ferment again, wash again, then soak the clean parchment in clean water before drying. The first fermentation runs one to four days depending on the weather, and the soak about twelve hours.12
Two things explain it. Kenya’s coffee is grown high and the mills are cold, so a tank that would finish overnight in Colombia takes a day or more, and one long fermentation is harder to judge than two shorter ones. And the second wash is a correction: it gets the last of the coat off, and leftover mucilage is exactly what discolours parchment and sours a cup during drying.2
The soak is the step people actually mean when they say Kenyan. Kenyan practice holds that it improves colour and taste;12 the nearest controlled trial found a longer soak made the cup more intense, which is not the same thing as better.7 Kenya’s reputation for a piercingly clean, blackcurrant-edged cup is real, and the soak is the step most often pointed at, but pointing is not the same as proving.
For the enthusiast: what the evidence on the soak actually says, and what it plausibly does
The FAO’s description of Kenyan practice states plainly that soaking parchment for about twelve hours after fermentation improves the coffee both in colour and in taste.12 That is an industry judgement rather than a controlled result, and it is worth marking as one. The nearest controlled evidence is a large processing trial that applied a 24-hour soak to half of every batch and found it increased overall flavour intensity in the cup.7 Increased intensity is a real, measured effect. It is not the same claim as increased quality, and I have not found a study that makes the stronger claim well.
What the soak plausibly does is mechanical rather than microbial. Parchment coming out of a tank is carrying acids, sugars and microbes in its surface water. Sitting it in clean water, and changing that water, dilutes all of it away before drying locks whatever is left onto the bean.
06 the water
This is the bill, and it is mostly avoidable.
A traditional wet mill spends about forty litres of water per kilogram of coffee, and half of it is not washing anything.
The kilogram here is of dry parchment coffee: washed and dried, but still in its shell. A conventional Colombian mill spends about 40 litres on each, and half of that goes on flushing pulp away, a job a screw conveyor could do dry.2 Pulping without water saves a further eighth. The part that is genuinely necessary, washing, is the smallest share.
At the frugal end, the machines. A demucilager that strips the coat, washes and cleans in one pass has been shown to do the whole job on 0.6 litres.2 There is a catch, and Cenicafé’s own manual states it: a demucilager fitted badly, or run above one litre per kilogram, or installed without fixing how the pulp is handled, will pollute more than the tank it replaced.2 The machine is not the saving. The redesign around the machine is the saving.
For the enthusiast: the three-way split, Becolsub, and the zero-discharge mill
The unit is written L/kg dpc. A conventional mill’s 40 splits three ways: 12.5 percent in pulping, 37.5 percent in washing the beans and moving them around, and 50 percent in flushing the pulp away.2
Cenicafé’s packaged Becolsub system, which pulps without water, demucilages mechanically and carries the pulp and mucilage away together on a screw conveyor, runs at about 0.8.213 An ecological mill designed to discharge nothing at all comes in under 0.5.13 That is between one fiftieth and one eightieth of the traditional figure.
What comes out the other end.
The used water, the effluent, is not dirty in the ordinary sense. It is clear-ish, smells sweet at first and vinegary later, and is extremely rich in dissolved sugar, pectin and acid. That richness is the problem: bacteria in a river feed on it and use up the oxygen. Cenicafé’s way of putting it is the most vivid: the pulp and mucilage in one kilogram of cherry can remove all of the oxygen from 7.4 cubic metres of clear water.2 That is a small swimming pool per sack.
And it happens at scale, every processing season, in the headwaters. Below one discharge on the Gidabo River in southern Ethiopia, which supplies more than 1.58 million people, dissolved oxygen reached zero.14 Zero dissolved oxygen means nothing with gills is alive in that reach.
For the enthusiast: BOD and COD, the Gidabo survey, and why treatment is hard
The measure is BOD, biochemical oxygen demand: how much dissolved oxygen the bacteria in a water body will consume while eating what you put in it, in milligrams per litre. A companion measure, COD or chemical oxygen demand, does the same thing with a chemical oxidant and catches material the bacteria cannot reach. Raw coffee wastewater has been reported at BOD up to 20,000 mg/L and COD up to 50,000 mg/L, with a pH below 4.15 One Colombian review puts the polluting power of coffee effluent at 60 to 240 times that of domestic wastewater.13
The Gidabo survey sampled during the processing season and found mills using an average of 63 litres of water per kilogram of green coffee, with 90 percent of the 285 mills surveyed having no working recycling. Below one discharge, pH fell from 7.48 to 5.05, BOD rose from 30 to 300 mg/L and COD from 64.5 to 2,669 mg/L.14
Treatment is possible and it is not easy. Anaerobic lagoons are the common answer and they are frequently undersized: the Gidabo survey measured an average retention time of 1.99 days, which is not long enough to degrade the load.14 Coffee wastewater also contains tannins, phenolics and alkaloids, including all that caffeine that left with the pulp, and those actively inhibit the biological degradation you are relying on.18 There is a substantial literature on turning the waste into something useful instead, from compost and biogas to pectin recovery,17 and Cenicafé’s own route is to mix pulp and mucilage and feed them to worms.2
The redesign works where it is adopted: handling pulp dry avoids 72 percent of the potential contamination at a stroke.2 But I want to be careful not to turn this into an accusation pointed at farmers. The frugal designs cost money, the traditional ones do not, and the person choosing is often working under five hectares.3 Washed coffee has a real environmental cost, the cost is technically solvable, and solving it is a capital expense borne by the poorest party in the chain.
For the enthusiast: how much the redesign controls, and the national scale
Pulp handled dry avoids 72 percent because the pulp is 72 percent of the potential contamination and the mucilage only 28.2 Four rinses plus dry pulp handling controls about 85 percent, and a properly built mechanical mill controls about 92, by physical means alone with no treatment plant at all.2 Scaled up, the numbers get large: Colombia’s traditional mills were estimated to need 46 million cubic metres of water a year, roughly the annual domestic consumption of a city of 840,000 people.2
The farm sizes are from the Colombian field survey: 74.6 percent of its farms were under five hectares.3
07 drying
Half water, down to about a ninth.
The washed parchment has to dry for days, gently at first, before it can be stored.
Parchment leaving the washing channel is about 53 percent water by weight,2 and it has to reach roughly 10 to 12 percent:22 too wet and moulds grow in the sack, too dry and the bean goes brittle and loses aromatics. The first day is gentle, because wet parchment cracks if it is heated hard, and a cracked shell stops protecting the seed. Drying is where the two routes converge, and the dry route’s post covers it in full.
coffee/natural-process · drying, at length →
For the enthusiast: the export standards, Kenya’s named stages, storage and dryers
National export standards cluster tightly around the same window: Rwanda specifies 10 to 12.5 percent for fully washed grades, Colombia caps green coffee at 12 percent, Uganda at 12.0 percent for washed arabica.22 Kenyan practice targets 11 percent and describes the run in named stages, from skin drying at 55 down to 45 percent, through white, soft black and hard black, to a conditioning stage that lands at 11.12 Cenicafé’s storage work found that parchment kept in cooled, aerated bins held 10 to 12 percent for a year and kept its cup quality for up to ten months, while sacks left in ambient conditions drifted up to 12.9 percent and lost it.2
Mechanical dryers manage the cracking problem with high air temperatures against very wet grain, where the evaporation itself keeps the bean cool: air at up to 80 degrees can leave the grain below 40.2 Controlled thin-layer experiments on parchment arabica at 50, 60 and 70 degrees and 10 to 30 percent relative humidity map the trade-off between speed and how far the moisture actually falls.23 On a farm without a dryer the same job is done by shade first, then sun, and by not spreading the layer too thick.
08 the cup
Clean is not an absence. It is citric and malic acid.
A washed coffee tastes of the seed’s own chemistry, because the fruit was taken away before it could add much.
The trade’s words for washed coffee are clarity, structure, brightness and a clean finish. Separately they are vague. Together they describe one thing: the flavours that show up are the ones the plant put in the seed while the cherry was ripening, and the ones the fruit could have added were removed before they had the chance.
That does not make it unfermented. A day in a tank is long enough for lactic acid bacteria to take over10 and for yeasts to leave a real mark on the cup.11 What washing does is stop that early and take the food away, so far less of the fruit’s sugar is ever converted into anything. The acids left are mostly the plant’s own, chiefly citric and malic, rather than ones the microbes made out of the pulp. That is what cuppers call a clean cup, and it is a deliberate choice rather than a default.
coffee/fermentation · what the microbes make →
For the enthusiast: what the seed itself is doing, and where the chemistry studies disagree
Two measured differences support the same picture. In a full wet mill sampled stage by stage, the green beans held the highest concentration of organic acids and sucrose of anything in the line, at roughly 4.96 and 5.07 grams per 100 grams of dry weight depending on the mill type.16 And the seed is behaving differently in the two routes: germination activity inside the bean peaks about two days after wet processing begins and about a week after dry processing begins, which is a different metabolic history written into the same seed.19
Where the studies disagree is on composition, and they disagree sharply. One controlled study of wet processing found no influence of the processing method at all on chlorogenic acid content.20 Others report wet-processed coffee higher in chlorogenic acids and trigonelline and lower in sucrose than semi-dry. I have not found a reconciliation, and the reason is probably that processing is entangled with origin, variety, altitude and roast in almost every dataset that exists.
And the thing that complicates the sales pitch.
Washed coffee dominates specialty buying, and the usual explanation is that it is better. The evidence for that is weaker than the market suggests: when a Colombian study compared five processes on one lot, the natural scored highest, and statistically differently from the others.21 One study on one lot is not a verdict, but it is not nothing either, and it points the opposite way to the price list.
My own reading of why washed dominates has less to do with peak quality and more to do with variance. A washed lot has a definite ending: somebody decides the coat is off and washes it, and from then on the coffee is a bare seed drying in the open. A natural has no such moment; fermentation carries on inside the drying fruit until the water runs out. That makes washed the route you choose when you need a thousand bags that taste the same, which is what a roaster buying to a profile needs. Reproducibility is a real virtue, and it is not the same virtue as being the best cup in the room.
For the enthusiast: that five-process study, and four places this story stops being true
The five were natural, honey, conventional aerobic wet, aerobic with a prior fermentation in cherry, and anaerobic with a prior fermentation in cherry, profiled by gas chromatography and by a sensory panel. Fifty-one volatile compounds were identified, and the families that separated the processes were ketones and pyrroles.21
09 what I do with it
I read washed as a promise about consistency, not about quality.
The word tells me the fruit came off fast and somebody decided when to stop. It does not tell me the coffee is good.
I buy coffee about twice a month and keep a log of it, so this is a practical question for me. Washed now tells me three things and no more. That the fruit came off within hours. That somebody made a decision about when to stop, which means a person was paying attention on a specific morning. And that the lot is likely to be more uniform than a natural from the same farm, because a definite ending produces less spread than an indefinite one.
It does not even tell me whether the fermentation was controlled: the same word covers tanks run for eleven hours and tanks run for seventy-two.3 When a bag says washed and nothing else, I read that as a category, not a claim.
Two things changed in how I brew. Washed lots are the ones where I chase acidity, because citric and malic are what is actually there, and a slightly higher water temperature or a slightly finer grind brings them forward. And I stopped treating a faint sourness in a washed coffee as my brewing error: vinegar and overripe fruit in a washed cup is a processing signature with a known cause, and past twenty hours in a tank it is what you get.2
What I would most like on a bag, and cannot get, is the fermentation time and how it was ended. Washed, tank ended by cone at 14 hours, mechanically demucilaged, water recirculated would tell me more about my morning than the altitude, the variety and the tasting notes put together.
For the enthusiast: the processing fields I keep in my log, and what this post still lacks
Until a bag says it, I write the processing note in the log and leave a column empty next to it.
// what "washed" would have to say to be useful. Most bags fill // the first line and nothing else. { "process": "washed", // a category, not a claim "mucilage_off": "tank", // tank or machine, they differ [7] "tank_hours": null, // field data span 10 to 72 h [3] "ended_by": null, // clock, hand, or a measurement [3] "soaked": null, // the Kenyan step, if any [12] "water_reuse": null, // 0.6 or 40 L/kg, nobody says [2] "dried_to_pct": 11, // the one number that is standard "grind": 16, "water_c": 94 }
Two things I still want to add: a proper look at whether soaking has ever been tested against a no-soak control on the same lot in Kenya, which I could not find, and a water figure that reports litres per kilogram of green coffee as well as per kilogram of parchment, so the Ethiopian and Colombian numbers can sit on one axis honestly.
10 your agent
Use your agent with this page.
Every section and every figure has an ask agent button: pick how deep to go, and it copies a prompt about just that part. Selecting a passage offers one too. Paste it into any assistant.
For the enthusiast: how the tools work, and an example answer
Processing is the part of coffee where the audience splits hardest. Somebody wants to know why their bag says washed, somebody is a food science student who wants the pectin chemistry, and somebody runs a mill and wants the water figures. One piece of prose cannot be pitched at all three at once, so every section and every figure on this page is also written out three times, at three levels, by me rather than by a model at runtime.
The six tools are registered with WebMCP when the browser has it, which today means behind a flag, and the page does nothing at all when it does not. All six are read-only, answer from this page’s own data, and make no network call beyond loading that data from this site. An agent without a browser can read the plain-text version of the whole post, prose and sources, at washed-process.txt.
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