Ripening Berries
Pepper growing on the vine is green. When it ripens in the sun it turns red. The berry fills with sweetness and fruitiness – sometimes with citrus notes, sometimes with other spicy notes such as gingerbread. It varies from farm to farm, the soil and the microclimate. In this respect it is rather like Premier Cru wines where grapes from neighbouring chateaux produce wines of differing character whose individuality is highly distinctive.
Harvesting and Drying
After harvesting the red berries are picked off by hand and placed on mats in the sun to dry. They are washed and dried again altogether spending three to four days in the sun. A curious thing is that the red pepper from Phu Quoc turns a deep burgundy (to continue the wine metaphor) colour. By contrast Kampot red is a much lighter shade of red. In fact we have one or two farms in Phu Quoc whose red pepper more closely resembles the colour of Kampot red.
Sorting by Hand
Once dried the pepper is bagged and sent to our sorting factory. Sorting pepper by hand is an incredibly laborious task but it is the only way to remove all imperfect berries and arrive at the ‘perfect’ product for which we are known.
White Pepper
White Pepper is made by several different methods according to the tradition of the farmers but in essence it involves removing the pericarp of the berry to reveal the white inner kernel. Pepper is either soaked in water or kept damp to aid the removal of the skin. Either way the pepper that is used to make white is the larger red peppercorns. What is abundantly plain is that no form of chemical is ever used in our process whatsoever. There is a variation of colour and fragrance of white pepper from one farm to another and some buyers form a particular attachment to one or the other according to individual taste and preference.