Follow
the links below to articles written by Tom & Maria (and a few great
pieces by others in the coffee trade); some facts, some opinions, some
mine, some not.
New Sweetmaria's
Weblog has current comments about newly arriving
coffees and other such things. Also check out our separate Roasted
Weblog. Yep, we're making logs here. |
All
articles are provided for informational use only, and
you are solely responsible for any bad stuff that may come from any
crazed home coffee roasting experiments you undertake...from electric
shock to a shockingly great cup of coffee! All for the love of of
our favorite brown beverage... You also need to ask to re-publish
any of this information! No "scraping" allowed.
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Latest
Additions:
- A tribute to Paul Stauder Jr., an important person who helped us get some of our greatest Guatemala coffees.
- I just returned from Sumatra and Sulawesi; it was a looonnng trip that seemed all too short. I divided the pictures into
- The Aceh District of Sumatra (actually north of North Sumatra!) which includes Takengon and the areas around Lake Tawar
- .... and then Sulawesi and Tana Toraja, an amazing, mystical place, where I handily whacked my head crawling through a tunnel in a Toraja traditional burial cave. It still hurts. -Tom
- Tom returned from a Cupping Competition in Peru with a handful of pictures, and some thoughts on why Peru coffee isn't as respected as it could be ...
- The shennanigans of the Costa Rica Micro-Millers visit to Sweet Maria's.
- I have 2 new photosets for recent trips to Ethiopia's Harar region, and from the first-ever Rwanda Cup of Excellence Competition 2008. You can also view both of these on our Coffee Image Gallery site.
- I did a short page on the First Ever Cupping Class at Sweet Maria's that happened last July.
- Here is our first attempt and a handy Roasted Postcard, and an explanation of why it kinda failed to be what we had hoped...
- Many may not know about the problems internal to the SCAA Roaster's Guild, but it came to a head at the 2008 Roaster's Guild Retreat due to gangs from Mille Lac. Read more ...
- Perhaps the most unusual is Costa Rica RIP Red Honey Coffee. RIP? Roasted In Parchment. This coffee has not been dry-milled, the green bean is still in the outer shell. In perhaps the wackyest moment in Sweet Maria's history, we discovered you can roast coffee in the parchment shell, and it has a very unusual flavor. This is for experts only, since you can't really see the green coffee as it turns brown. See the review and the pictures of the RIP process.
- The Gesha lots are here and I made a page to help with roasting, using my new Canon 100mm macro lens! Gesha Roast Pictures page
- I had a very interesting Colombia
trip to Huila, Cauca and Narino districts in late May but have been delayed getting
the pictures together. You can also see it on the beta images site.
- I have updated the page about my coffee plant
collection, AKA Growing Coffee at Home.
- I did a lot of cupping in Guatemala City looking
for special lots, and then some quick trips to farms in the nearby
states. Check out my Guatemala
Travelogue. What, another Guatemala trip a few weeks
later, with the family (Maria, Ben, my Mom, Myself), and yet another Guatemala
Picturelog for 2008.
- Here's an interesting article on Coffee
Bitterness and the role of CGAs (chlorogenic
acids).
- I can't go to the Tolima are of Colombia where
our Las Florestales is from ... there's too much FARC Guerilla
activity in the area! But our coffee sourcer for this lot, Genevieve
Kappler was
able to go.
- A whirlwind tour of Costa
Rica Micro Mills in mid February!
- Espresso Pages-
Tom worked on these pages a lot a long time ago - but there was never
a link to them that could be easily found. The information is still
good- though I am sure he would consider the pages to be still a work
in progress (4 years later) .... Maria
- January 2008: India ... another example of
gross camera addiction. I took 1350 images, and narrowed it down to
302 for my India
Travelogue.
There's also a brief essay.
- It took a week to sort through them all, but
here is my little travelogue for Yemen,
just 350 photos or so. You can view it here,
or on our new beta site Image
Gallery. It's
one of the most intriguing coffee origins, and one of the best trips
I have taken.
- Here's
a travelogue of my trip
to Ethiopia to
cup at many exporters in Addis Ababa, and get ready for the new crop
coffees.
- We have posted a .PDF version of the Imbibe
Magazine article that featured 3 Sweet Maria's home roasting customers.
- A collection of single-bean
macro images representing
different varietals and processes. It's not exhaustive at all, but
simply what I had nearby. -Tom
- An interesting article about coffee
chemistry and freshness.
- A new version of the Sweet
Maria's Cupping Log for incoming samples, with links to the older versions.
- Have you ever noticed
how different origin sections of the list expand and contract throughout
the year? Of course there
is a reason for this - it means that coffee from this region is in
season - that the best of the arrivals from the past couple of months
have been from this region. So one time of year the South American
section will be chock full of coffees- and sometimes not. Generally
when we are on the verge of a new season - we will have very few
coffees from a region as we wait on the new crop arrivals. A rough
production chart that shows how coffee production from around the
world is available here - Coffee
Production Timetable.
- A page with some interesting microscopic
images of the coffee seed, and the difference between
a healthy bean and a defective bean.
- Since we are finally offering Daterra Yellow
Bourbon, I have made a page to describe Daterra
Farms, including a
snippet of my travelogue and photos of their amazing coffee processing
system.
- Here's some pictures of our empty old place in Emeryville and our
new place in hot, upcoming, hi-energy West
Oakland!
- Maria has written a FAQ called How to Choose a Home Roaster - a good
summary of the options.
- I have started, barely, to actually log all the incoming samples
that I cup whether we buy them or not. Tom's
Cupping Log. This might,
over time, give people an idea of the process, and all the coffees
we go
through
to
find the really nice lots. But this is just a beginning - I think this
page will be impossibly huge after a while. Also, we have a single
page listing of all the Moisture Content Readings of our currrent stock
- I updated the Coffee
Production Yearly Timetable to reflect peak crop pickings and
shippings, but it is still a very rough guide to the crop cycle.
- I created a new version of the Roasted
Coffee Pictorial Guide with much improved pictures. Click on
the small images to see the larger versions, and I have also added a
multi-bean photo for each roast stage.
- Don't ask why, but we keep a page just for obsolete
products ...
RIP
- I have created a sort of weblog
for our main page to archive happenings there.
- The TINY
JOY archives are at the bottom of the page. The latest issues
are in PDF format!
The Home Coffee Roasting Mailing List
is a free discussion group for our home roaster customers. A small, focused
mailing list can be a great way to exchange ideas and opinions. Please
subscribe today!We have an improved list
subscription process, a Digest version and an Archive!
New Sweetmaria's
Weblog has current comments about newly arriving
coffees and other such things. Also check out our separate Roasted
Weblog. Yep, we're making logs here. For our weekly roasted coffee we have Sweet
Maria's Roasted Weblog. And check out our on-line back issues of our
printed
Tiny Joy newsletter,
which you receive along with your orders from Sweet Maria's.
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Sweet
Maria's: about our shop, about us, our history.
Click Here
for Sweet Maria's List of
Further Readings and Internet Resources
On-line Back Issues of
our newsletter
Tiny Joy are listed down this page -scroll down or Click
Here


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Green
Coffee Beans
Reviews :
We are very proud of our unroasted green coffee selection
of 70+ types.
Each is meticulously cup-rated, and selected from particular current
crop lots, representing the "best of the
best!"
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Green
Coffee Beans: We
are very proud of our unroasted green coffee selection
of 70+ types. Each is meticulously cup-rated,
and selected from particular current crop lots, representing the "best
of the best!"
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This
page and most of the articles within are authored by Tom Owen and Sweet
Maria's Coffee, Inc. and are not to be reproduced without permission.
Please respect authorship and ask! |
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Other Roasters, Obsolete
Roasters
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Roasting and Green
Coffee Evaluation Topics:
Articles by Sweet Maria's
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I
maintain a sort of nifty Coffee
Roaster Image Gallery page- just a jumble of all the roasters
I have used, and ones I have come across on trips.
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Antique Home
Roasters: Home roasting has a long history in the United States,
when farmers and rural folk had to do most everything for themselves.
If you are interested, here are some of the old
home coffee roasters we have...
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I created a new version of the Roasted
Coffee Pictorial Guide with much improved pictures. Click
on the small images to see the larger versions, and I have also
added a multi-bean photo for each roast stage.
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We also have
an older Degree
of Roast
pictorial page
- The Cupping Log excel file became corrupted and
I have finally started a second version: Tom's
Cupping Log
I have started, barely, to actually log all the incoming samples
that I cup whether we buy them or not. Tom's
Cupping Log. This might, over time, give people an idea
of the process, and all the coffees we go through to find the really
nice lots. But this is just a beginning - I think this page will
be impossibly huge after a while. Also, we have a single page listing
of all the Moisture
Content Readings of our currrent stock
-
I updated the Coffee Production
Yearly Timetable to reflect peak crop pickings and shippings,
but it is still a very rough guide to the crop cycle.
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Taste
Terminology and Roast Names
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How
We Select Coffees, and "Cupping"
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Here's
the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel!
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We have a Roast
Temperature Curve Page (under construction!)
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Here's
Looking at Green Beans
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Green
Coffee Storage for home roasters
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Green
Coffee Freshness Issues
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An quick look
at the fun stuff we
find in coffee, sometimes.
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Coffee
Packaging and Freshness
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A little cupping test
performed on Ethiopia Yirgacheffe to evaluate any
difference in the cup character based on screen size.
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Another attempt to explain the differences in roasted
coffee color, surface texture, and corresponding
ground coffee color.
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Espresso Equipment
and Other Coffee Equipment
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Roasting and Green
Coffee Evaluation Topics:
Great Articles from Other Sources
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Coffee
Travels:
Our Coffee Trade, Farm & Cupping Trips
I don't document
every trip, and yet this category has grown rather large... hence
2 columns |
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Coffee
Travels:
Our Coffee Trade, Farm & Cupping Trips
(Continued) |
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I did a lot of cupping in Guatemala City looking
for special lots, and then some quick trips to farms in the nearby
states. Check out my Guatemala
Travelogue. What, another Guatemala trip a few weeks
later, with the family (Maria, Ben, my Mom, Myself), and yet another Guatemala
Picturelog for 2008.
-
I can't go to the Tolima area of Colombia where
our Las Florestales is from ... there's too much FARC Guerilla
activity in the area! But our coffee sourcer for this lot, Genevieve was
able to go.
-
A whirlwind tour of Costa
Rica Micro Mills in mid February!
-
January 2008: India ... another example of
gross camera addiction. I took 1350 images, and narrowed it down to
302 for my India Travelogue.
There's also a brief essay.
-
It took a week to sort through them all, but
here is my little travelogue for Yemen, just 350 photos
or so. You can view it here,
or on our new beta site Image
Gallery. It's one of the most intriguing coffee origins,
and one of the best trips I have taken.
-
Here's a travelogue of my trip
to Ethiopia to cup at many exporters in Addis Ababa,
and get ready for the new crop coffees.
- A short but sweet cupping trip to the Dota,
Tarrazu and Naranjo regions of Costa Rica.
- Since we are finally offering Daterra Yellow
Bourbon, I have made a page to describe Daterra
Farms, including a snippet of my travelogue and photos
of their amazing coffee processing system.
- A real short trip to Motozintla,
Mexico, "land of the squirrels," way south
in Chiapas state at the border with Guatemala.
- Here's my totally uninformative picture book
of the 2007
Roasters Guild Retreat and a matching, very curmudgeonly
comments about the 2007
SCAA Conference in Long Beach
- Peru, what an amazing place,
what a screwy place in terms of coffee. If I seem too harsh, 395 photos
in a travelog (and a video to boot) should show the enthusiasm I also
have for Peru ... there are 7 pages of thumbnail images, and I hope
you find some of it, if not most of it, interesing: Peru
Coffee Tour 2006
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Travelog for Guatemala Cup
of Excellence and other Guatemala travels 2006
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Travelog for El
Salvador Cup of Excellence 2006
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I posted new travelogs for
my recent trips, with all my coffee competition cupping scores
and the final results. First off was the 2006
Best of Panama competition, then off to to Honduras
Cup of Excellence 2006 in San Pedro Sula, and finally
the 2006
Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition in Granada,
Nicaragua (a beautiful colonial town). I hope you can tolerate some
tongue-in-cheek commentary, with a smattering of useful observations.
Lots of pictures, and some of them actually have something to do
with coffee! -Tom
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Back from the Brasil
Cafe do Cerrado 2005 event , but off to Bolivia
Cup of Excellence (hurricane permitting)[hurricane was not permitting
- here are the Bolivia 2005
winners though]. I had time to parse 800 photos and ended
up with about 150 that I just had to share. Why do I do this?
I don't know. And be warned that a lot of it is not about coffee,
strictly speaking. -Tom
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January harvest trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador and a whole mess
o' pictures, as usual. Check out the Nicaragua
- El Salvador Travelogue
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I have finished the travelog for my Colombia
Trip, which includes the 2005 Cup of Excellence
competition. It's a different format than before, more
and I put a lot of work into it. I hope you get something out
of it... And there is a special feature: What does a coffee cupping
room sound like? Well, I made a little stereo recording while
walking around the room at the 2005 Colombia CoE.
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I am back from Kona and the 2004 Kona Cupping Competition and
made a travelogue of the
event ... which feels a bit incomplete. Even with a
limited time there, it makes a big impression and there is no way
to convey it in a few photos. -Tom
- I have finished my rather extensive travelogue from Brazil
2004 Cerrado Competition and Coffee Tour. Maria thinks
I am nuts. I spent 3 days trimming down my 600 pictures to a
mere 179, and writing the decriptions for each. There is just
so much I learn on each new trip, so these web pages are as much
for myself as you everyone else. I hope you get some
I finally finished
a complete journal and slide show for my trip as a judge
at the 2004
El Salvador Cup of Excellence Competition!
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I
also did a "slide show" of pictures from the Nicaragua
Cup of Excellence coffee competition, 2004 . It took
me a long time to get the pages together and so I am sorry it
lacks detail. But there are some nice images...
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I created a
sort of quick and temporary page of images from last week's Costa
Rica trip. More to come...
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There's a new
pictorial of my 2003 trip to the Bolivia
Coffee Competition in 2 sections Page
1 and Page 2,
and a short Bolivia
Movie too!
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I
have made a "slide show" of my trip to the 2003
Best of Panama cupping competition.
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My Honduras
Cupping Trip 2003: Part
One is
the competition and tour of the Northern coffee lands. Part
Two is the tour of the Southern coffee lands near the
capital of Tegucigalpa.
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I have a lot
of information and pictures from a tour of Nicaragua this
year, including judging in the Cup of Excellence competition.
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Tom's
2001 SCAA Convention Report ...bitter, very bitter.
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I had a couple
comments and pictures from the 2003
SCAA Conference in Boston.
A new page
from my trip to the Panama
Cupping Competition in early April 2002 is done!
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I have finally
completed a lengthy pictorial page on my Trip
to the Guatemala Highlands, April 2001
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Health Concerns,
Caffeine, Decaffeinating
The Ecology of Coffee
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Coffee
Producing Origins:
Interesting Articles from Other Sources |
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The Odds and Ends!
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Coffee Cutivation and
Technical Aspects.
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Coffee, History,
Literature: Coffee has inspired some great historical comment,
essays, protests, opera, etc. Here are some of my
favorite historical quotations on the subject of coffee
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Sweet Maria's
coffees were reviewed
by Ken Davids in Sept. 99 CoffeeReview
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Coffee is still
transported as it was 200 years ago, in 60
to 70 Kg Burlap Coffee Bags. Here's a sampling of ours...
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Here's what
a real East Bay coffee warehouse looks
like.
- The new
sweet maria's skateboard a la natas kaupas for freestyle flip
tricks is but a hoax. Well, yes and no. I have one, but you can't
ride it... unless you come to west oakland, and ask nicely. And
sign this waiver ...
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I tried to
put together a pictorial about how I grow
coffee plants at home. This is dated now, and
I have over 60 plants with at least 25 unique cultivars represented,
including robusta types, liberica, excelsa and other non-arabica
coffees.
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A friend sent
me a couple interesting photos from India, which I turned into
a page about Exotic Coffee Cultivars
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My review of
El Salvador 2004 Cup of Excellence
includes a visit to the ProCafe Experimental Coffee Farm with lots
of Cultivar Pictures!
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Coffee vs. Wine,
the debate goes on. This was the article
I prepared for the March Tiny Joy, before editing it
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How about Home Processing Coffee? Well, you
need coffee cherry to do that. I brought back some extra from Costa
Rica so I gave home wet-processing a
try
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I had made a page that concerns Buying
Bags of Coffee, essentially some insights about dealing with
brokers and why I feel like home roasters and startup roasters should
be cautioned away from doing so. Might sound self-serving, but there's
other reasons for this position... Nice pictures too!
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The Coffee Trade:
Sweet Maria's Other Pictorials |
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An updated look
at Organic and Fair Trade coffee in Ethiopia,
as of 2004
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Coffee from the Island
of Saint Helena is something we get when it is available
and when it is good. But the crop is very limited, and there
have been problems with reliability lately. Whether we will
have it again is a unsure...
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Our coffee shipment
on the way from the Isle of St. Helena. Here's
some wonderful pictures!
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It's the middle
of the busy season but it's also time for the Brazil Coffee Auction!
I posted a list of the winning
coffees and a few comments and our lot, the Boa Vista (due
in March)
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Here's some comments
and pictures from a recent cupping of India Coffees with
Ken Davids, and a tour of Mr. Espresso's wood-fired roasters.
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I had a nice
visit over at Intelligentsia in
Chicago, a roasting company I hold in high regard...
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We have a special
page dedicated to our winning lot of 2002 Brazil Cup of Excellence
Auction Lot, Fazenda Boa Vista
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Our
Coffee Cupping Reviews have tons of information as do the archive
of reviews...
- Central
America: Costa
Rica | Guatemala | Honduras | Mexico | Nicaragua | Panama | El
Salvador
- South
America: Bolivia | Brazil | Colombia | Peru
- Africa/Arabia: Burundi | Congo | Ethiopia | Kenya | Tanzania | Uganda | Zambia | Zimbabwe | Yemen
- Indonesia/Asia: Bali | India | Java | Papua
New Guinea | Sumatra | Sulawesi | Timor
- Islands/Blends/Others: Hawaii | Puerto
Rico | Jamaica | Dominican | Chicory | Sweet
Maria's Blends
- Decafs: Swiss
Water Process, Natural Decafs, MC Decafs, C0-2 Decafs
- Robustas: India | Uganda Archives: A
- F | G
- K | L
- P | R
- S | T
- Z | Pre-2000
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