In Part 1, I explained how to harvest and prepare the beans for curing, and what equipment you’ll need. Next, we’ll go through how to sweat, dry and age the beans.
The Sweat Cycle
Following from the previous tutorial, your beans are now in the warm sweat box.
The beans are going to stay in the sweat box for 48 hours at first. Use the thermometer to watch the temperature in the zone where the beans are. The optimal temperature is 115℉, so the closer it stays to that temp, the better. Lower temperatures are OK, but once it gets into the low 90s, refill the water jugs.
This may be the most challenging part of the process to get right, but remember that having it drop into the 80s is not a big deal, it just will slow things down. Do your best to keep the temps up, but don’t worry about it.
The beans will become sticky and wet in the bag. This is what we’re looking for, it’s the sweat.
Once the 48 hours (or so–no need to be exact) is up, we cycle the beans through the dehydrator. Take your beans out of the bag and spread onto your dehydrator shelves. Turn the dehydrator to 115℉ and leave the beans in there for an hour or so. The stickiness should dry some…probably not all the way dry for the first few cycles.
Refill the hot water jugs with hot water.
After the hour of dehydrating, put the beans back into their bag (don’t be tempted to replace, wash or dry the bag, just re-use the wet bag), and then into the sweat box.
While the first sweat cycle is 48 hours, all subsequent sweat cycles will be 24 hours until the sweating is done. Between each cycle is 1 hour in the dehydrator. The effect of this is a very slow drying while the beans are sweating. This is partly to prevent rotting with all that warmth and moisture.
Once you’re into the sweat by a week, it becomes less critical that you do the dry cycle every 24 hours. Skipping a day is not a big deal. The temperature needs to stay near the optimal 115℉ as much as possible the whole time, however.
In our operation here, we use a electrically heated sweat box, much like an incubator, so the temperature control is automatic.
Completing the Sweat
The sweat is going to take 18 days from when you first put the beans into the sweat box. In that time, the color will turn from green to a light greenish brown and finally to brown. The aroma of the beans will go from sharp and floral at first, to a kind of (what I call) “leathery” smell. It won’t so much smell of vanilla until the end of the sweating period.
The beans may be a bit oily (the “oil” is really glucose) to the touch at the end of the 18 days, and they will have begun to shrink and get longitudinal wrinkles. These wrinkles are something you are going to focus on when assessing the progress of a bean as it cures.
Drying the Beans
The next stage is slowly drying the beans until they reach the desired moisture level. This can take anywhere from 3 weeks (for smaller beans) to 2 months to complete.
How you do the drying depends on what situation you can arrange for the beans. Here in Hawaii, we dry them outdoors on a drying rack that is elevated (on a roof) and protected from the rain and sun. Depending on your circumstances, there are several ways you can do the drying.
We want to dry the beans very slowly to get the best quality. This allows any remaining vanillin reactions to complete within the bean. It also helps ensure that we don’t overdry the beans. The sweat has conditioned the beans so they are preserved and stable as far as spoilage is concerned, so we are not in a hurry to dry them.
The important considerations for drying vanilla are:
- Clean, dry environment
- Undisturbed for several weeks
- Plenty of air circulation
Here are some ideas for setups for drying the beans:
- Indoors on dehydrator shelves placed on a laundry rack or wire shelf
- Outdoors on a similar setup, but away from the ground or over concrete, such as on a patio. Keep them high off the ground and don’t let the drying beans get wet.
- Solar dehydrator not in the sun, similar location: high off the ground or over concrete, this is to avoid dew, which comes up from the ground.
- Dehydrator with fan on and heat off. Drying will happen much more quickly, watch them closely.
Checking the Beans’ Moisture Level
The drying process will need to continue as long as it takes for each bean to reach the desired moisture level. Each bean will dry at its own rate, so you will need to check on them frequently. Beans that are done are put into a sealed plastic bag.
To check the moisture level, look closely at the wrinkled surface of the bean. While a bean is drying, there will be wrinkles with smooth bean surface between them. As they dry, the width of the smooth surface between the wrinkles gets smaller. A fully-dried bean will have little or no smooth areas between the wrinkles: it will be all wrinkles.
You can feel the dryness as well. This takes some experience to get right, but you can squeeze the bean between your fingers to get a sense of what the moisture level inside is. What I look for is something like what you’d expect a soft dried fruit (such as an apricot) to feel like. As it dries, it will stop feeling slippery inside the bean and instead it will be a little firm yet still supple.
The color is another way to gauge the dryness: it will get darker, usually going from dark brown to almost black. This is not a reliable test, however, as it is normal for the bean color to vary depending on a lot of factors. Your beans may start out light brown and get darker, but only to a dark brown.
If the beans stay light brown, that is a quality issue. They will feel slightly hollow inside and dry on the surface. A bean like this is still usable, but it won’t have the flavor intensity of a good quality bean. The usual reason for this condition is an under-ripened bean.
Conditioning the Beans
Once the beans are dried, the final stage is to age or “condition” them for a while. As explained above, we place the dried beans in a sealed plastic bag once the finish drying. Label the bag with the date of the last bean to go in there.
The beans should condition for at least 3 months after drying. This is where the flavor and aroma settles in and stabilizes. Since the beans are together in a sealed container, the moisture and aroma equalizes, and you end up with a more consistent cure.
After the 3‑month conditioning, the beans are done and can be handled like any vanilla bean. They should be kept in a sealed container and will keep indefinitely that way. This is also when you will select out your beans for making extract.
Extract beans tend to be dryer, so select out all the beans that are firm, and not as supple. Also any small beans or beans that are split more than 1/2 inch. These beans are used to make your extract.
So that’s it, if you’re growing vanilla, you can use this tutorial to cure them for maximum flavor development and best bean condition while preventing mold.
[…] the next part, we get into how to complete the sweating process and how to dry and age the […]
Thank you for the great tutorial! I was searching for how to cure vanilla beans and came across this one. Pics of ripe beans helped me tremendously since this is the first crop of vanilla beans. A freezer, cooler with jugs of hot water, a dehydrator and best of all clear instructions seems very doable and makes better sense than other sources I read
We only had seven beans to harvest, the pollinating learning curve was quite steep and we wasted so many orchids until we figured it out. I’ll let you know how it turns out. I’m in Florida, zone 10a.
I’m glad to hear from you, Rhonda, please let us know how it all turns out. 7 beans is plenty to start with!
GREAT tutorial! Easy to understand instructions and I appreciated the photo of what the ripe beans should look like. I live in Pepe’ekeo on the Big Island. I’m just harvesting my first successful crop. I have probably 200 beans. The online tutorials I looked at for pollinating were less than stellar. (It took me YEARS to figure that out) I have 30 plants that are 4 years old. I am thoroughly enjoying this new found hobby.
A hui Hou.
Aloha,
Lynn Lincoln
Hi Lynn, that’s pretty impressive, you’ve got a lot of vanilla growing! I appreciate your comments, hard to tell how well I’ve conveyed the information.
I know what you mean about the pollination, even with all the videos out there, it took us a while to get it. Best of luck with your crop!
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I’m keeping my cooler with the jugs of water between 104–120 degrees and re-heat the water while I have the beans in the dehydrator. I bought a wireless refrigerator thermometer/monitor so I don’t loose heat when checking the temp.
The beans have turned brown and the longitudinal wrinkles are starting to appear. 18 days will be next Friday. I’m leaning towards drying them in the dehydrator. How much quicker will they dry?
I can’t say with much accuracy how fast they will dry in your dehydrator, but you will want to check them every day. Keep it on the lowest possible heat. Smaller beans might take a couple days, large beans could be a week. You’ll just have to monitor them closely and get them out when they are done to avoid over-drying them.
Aloha Roland, mahalo for sharing this information. Can you give more details about your electrically heated sweat box please.
Anna
I could write a whole article on this, explaining how to build it and where to get the parts. Briefly, it is a well-insulated cooler with a couple of solid-state heating elements and an electronic temperature control.
You can do something simpler with a heating pad (commonly available at a drugstore) that has a temperature control and a thermometer. I suggest you test the temperature to get the right setting before putting the beans right on the pad. You’re looking for 115℉
If you’re interested in how to build a sweat box like I use, I’ll write that up, it would be good content.
Would definitely love to hear more about building a sweat box like you use!
Will try thermostat and heating pad in the mean time.
Mahalo for your excellent posts.
Anna
You’re welcome!
Could you use a food dehydrator for a sweat box?
I doubt it…the environment should be warm and moist. Your beans are in plastic bags, but the moving air will still remove moisture from the beans (plastic bags are slightly porous) and dry them too quickly.
With your much appreciated help, Roland, I am nearly through the sweating process and about to dry my first batch of beans. I wasn’t loving the cooler & hot water jug setup, and since the beans are in a sealed plastic bag when they’re not in the dehydrator, I’ve been using my Anova sous vide set up to keep them at a steady 115 degrees. I double bagged them & don’t worry about getting all the air out, just enough to keep them submerged. It seems to be working. Still, I look forward to seeing your sweat box post when it comes out.
I live on Oahu’s east side, and have 13 beans, ranging in size from skinny 4″ to plump 8″. This whole endeavor is a wonderful learning experience and I hope to have 2 vines flowering this year. That would keep me busy!
Mahalo,
Carol
Hi Roland,
Great “How To” information with simple explanations and your responses to Replies answered one of my questions. Thanks for that!
I’m about three weeks out since the end of bloom pollination. Many of the first flowers I pollinated, the beans are already 6″- 8″ long and 1/2″ wide. Is this normal? I pollinated my first bloom just 2 months ago and I’m reading it’s a 9 month long growing process. My problem is a few of the largest beans and a few smaller are browning at the tip and then some are turning a bit yellow. Just this week I collected 8–10 beans that where on the ground (squirrel or heavy rain) and I’m using your process to do something with the beans other than toss them in the garbage. With only 100 beans set I’m afraid I’ll have nothing left after 9 months. I’m a treatment free beekeeper and I was hoping to use the beans to infuse my bees honey this year. I don’t treat with pesticide or fungicide so that leaves me little hope for any harvest if this is a disease problem. I’m about 100 mi north of 27deg. latitude (the sweet spot) in zone 9b in Clearwater, Fl. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Hi Tim,
It is normal for the beans to put on size pretty quickly after pollination. Within a couple of weeks, you’re seeing most of the full size the bean is going to achieve. After that, it changes little for the 9–10 months until it ripens.
If the beans you pollinated this year are turning yellow already, that is not right, those beans are failing and won’t be curable. However, be careful, because it’s normal for the flowering and new beans to be coming in before all of the previous year’s beans have ripened…so there can be some overlap. It may be your yellowing beans are actually last year’s ripening beans…ready to harvest and cure.
If the yellowing beans are indeed this year’s beans, it’s not good, but I’ve never seen anything like that, so I don’t know what the issue is. We grow a lot of plants, so we see a fair amount of things not going right, but I’ve never seen that. If you’ve got an agricultural extension agent you can talk to, that might be a good idea.
If you want to send a photo of the beans you’re concerned about, I will take a look and maybe have some idea what’s going on…[email protected]
I live south of the OP in FL and had the same thing happen last year. I would find slightly yellowed beans that had fallen to the ground, around 30% of the beans we pollinated. The beans falling off happened early in the season, not later on.I haven’t seen any yet this year, but it may be too soon. We finished pollinating The last orchids two weeks ago.
Interesting…is it possible this was due to cold weather?
Aloha Roland,
The vines on my vanilla orchids are turning brown in small sections throughout my greenhouse. All of a sudden there is a 3 inch section that has turned brown and with time it atrophy’s into a dead area area and eventually the rest of the vine dies. This happened once last year but only to one orchid. It was at the end of a row and was being exposed to direct sun at that time and I wrote it off to sunburn. Now it is happening throughout the greenhouse. A couple of weeks ago I had to replace the greenhouse (shade screen) my vanilla orchids are under. They were exposed to direct sun for almost two days. The top leaves got burned, died and shriveled up. Is this what is happening to the vine or could it be something else?
Hi Linda,
From you description, I agree it’s probably not sunburn, which tends to happen in patches on the leaves or just with general yellowing of the exposed parts.
What you’re describing could be necrosis caused by a virus. I’m not really qualified to diagnose, but I’ve seen this before and it’s important you take steps to prevent spreading it around. If you can remove the affected plant or plants, that will help a lot. They should be destroyed or at least disposed of somewhere far from other vanilla plants. Also, cutting tools can transmit it to other vanilla plants, so sterilize your clippers (you can use a bleach solution) after using them to cut affected plants.
Once you’ve removed the affected plants, you’ll need to keep an eye out for more of it appearing.
You can find out more from online resources such as this: pestnet.org
Hola Roland, I am at the very beginning stages so I appreciate your insight and everyone’s comments. You mentioned cold weather. In S. Florida we get cold snaps. My vines will be outside under a shade house. Is there something more I should do to keep the vines from “freezing?”
You also mentioned drying the beans outside on your roof to protect it from the sun and rain. Could you can take a picture of your drying rack on the roof? Any chance you can make videos and post them to youtube?
Thank you,
Adela
A fairly easy way to protect the plants from cold is to put up wind barriers so that cold air can’t blow through. It won’t protect them from a serious cold snap, though.
Yes, I need to include a picture of the drying racks, good idea. I am planning to do a video about curing the beans soon.