Good thinking right there.

....I shouldn't be laughing though and so lemme pass some knowledge to CashFlow and all. Mill cane is not your kawaida variety that you see being sold on the streets. Nah!!....It's basically more tougher and hardly good for chewing. Two, mill sugar comes to the mills accompanied by all manner of trash, takataka,sand and even small animals. There are no chances of eliminating this rubbish before crushing but once turned into juice, decanting and liming is carried out to eliminate some of this unwanted stuff plus poisons. Three, juice deteriorates very fast as it is easily attacked by a bacteria which "eats" the sugar thus turning it in fine sugars (Glucose and fructose). It also ferments quite easily and within 24 hours, you would not want your nostrils anywhere around fermenting juice. Finally, of course many mills churn out tonnes and tonnes of juice (The biggest mill in Kenya can pass through close to 9000 tonnes of juice per day). I don't know who would drink all that juice without drowning

The normal sugar is the main ingredient in local brewing /fermentation so either way it's a vice that the juice does not promote or reduce.

@Cashflow,

Maybe my point did not come out clearly. The hard part about cane comes when you are crushing it. As it is, small hand driven or motor driven household crushers will do fine if you were making juice for human consumption.They have no capacity to crush hard cane and as such, you would require mill house crushers. Normal mill crushers are heavy duty and some are meant to pass as much as 380 tonnes of cane per hour. Where do you start?. Cane knives, pound the cane using heavy duty hammers, shred (the smallest shredder i have seen weighs not less than 6 tonnes and has to be run at speeds of between 6500 to 8500 revs per minute! . Most, are steam driven even though technology is bringing in VFDs), scald using steam in the region of 180 degrees C (You would require a scalder and hence a medium pressure boiler of minimum 22TPH) and carry out diffusing (Here, you decant and lime) before passing your megasse through mill tandems to extract juice. Now, your hand crusher does not require all the said cane prep steps to get your juice.After cane prep comes de-watering and here you require mills running alongside HP hydraulics capable of delivering crushing pressure in the region of 20-30 MPa.In a nutshell, cane preparation is heavy duty machinery,capital and labour intensive. Let's not go to the maintenance and running costs...........really, being an engineer, you should already be seeing the impracticality!.....It's like hiring an FH lorry to transport 2 bags of maize from Mombasa to Nairobi!

Juice is an intermediary product in sugar manufacture. @Cashflow's question is why the juice cannot be bottled and sold to those who like sugarcane juice

@VVs,

Extraction of juice from mill cane is extra-ordinary difficulty even with the best crushers. The "finest" and well crushed cane by-product (Bagasse) will still have moisture in the region of 50% water. I really doubt there is a mill in Kenya which attains that and i think i would be right to put it that, our mills average would be 52% moisture content. At 48% moisture content, that would be a champion mill and this has been attained by mills in Mauritius, Australia,Brazil and SA. No more!. Let's get back to our domestic crusher!!!........You would be lucky to extract 15% of juice in cane for all your trouble!

@Sparkly,
I think you are already answered. Mill cane crushing for sugar is crude,labour intensive,dirty and generally a very expensive affair. If you invested in crushers like msc but for the purposes of bottling juice, you would never recover your investment unless you sold a bottle at the price of Mercury. Below is a juice producing machine which would cost you not more than Kshs 200,000. Compare that with a tandem the size of MSC which would cost you over Kshs 30 billion




A de-watering mill. On the foreground is a 22 MPa Dresserand hydraulic set. A cane factory with a diffuser would require 2 or 3 of this. A traditional tandem mil will have 4 or 5 of those. Nobody is going to waste his money this way simply because you are thirsty of cane juice.





The juice machine will produce "bagasse" that looks like this



While tandem crushers will give you this.

Which variety do you want from these: Nigeria, Palu, Bookers, Kaa ngumu varieties.

Look for the sweet, soft, juicy variety.

Remember to attack the base. Sugarcane is sweetest at the base.

They are also chewable. I used to chew them when I served as a cane cutter after completing my studies. However fellows like VVS may not be able to chew the cane I described.