Alajuela, Costa Rica –
Coffee.
It’s my drug of choice.
Every morning.
And I’m very glad that I already have it in my cabinet, ready to dump into the coffee maker every morning.
Especially now that I know just exactly what goes into getting it there…
Its not like I didn’t know, but I hadn’t seen the whole process myself.
From the tiniest of seedlings to fully grown, bean-producing plants.
From the harvesting to the roasting.
I mean, yeah, I had an idea of how it all goes, but there’s nothing like seeing it for myself.
So, since we were staying nearby, we decided that we wanted to visit the Doka Coffee Plantation, on the San Jose side of the Poas volcano.
I have seen pictures for as long as I can remember.
The coffee plants on the steep hillside, with the worker picking the beans and loading them into baskets being carried by a burro.
The beans being dried in the sun, all spread out on a large paved area.
But it’s another thing to see it all in person.
Right before my eyes.
Of course, we weren’t there during the harvest season, so we couldn’t see things in action.
But that allowed us to examine the machinery in detail, up close and personal.
And figure out how it all works.
It’s kinda like thumbing through the book How Things Work, where you see illustrations on all kinds of mechanical devices with their innards exposed, pointing out how the various parts interact.
It gives you a new level of understanding of mechanical things.
And these machines that we encounter in our everyday lives are no longer black boxes that work through magic.
Well, taking the coffee plantation tour gave us that same level of understanding, only for how coffee gets to our cup.
It all started when we were on our way to the plantation.
Even though we had our own car, we had decided to hire a local guide.
There were both good and bad outcomes to this decision.
One of the good things was, on the way to the plantation, he took us on a tour of the collection points around the plantation.
See, the workers who are harvesting the beans are paid by how much they pick.
And this is a very large plantation, with plants all up and down the mountainside.
So, they’ve got these collection points next to the road, where the workers bring what they’ve collected, it gets counted, and put on a truck for delivery to the plantation processing facility.
It’s basically a two-story counting house, where the workers bring their baskets into the upper level, and a truck backs into the lower level, then the combined coffee beans get dumped from the upper into the lower, straight onto the truck.
Simple, but effective.
See, at the plantation, when we got to the processing plant, we were given the summary story, making it sound as if the workers came to the main collection house with their harvest for the day.
Every day.
It was the full, romanticized Juan Valdez story, so to speak.
Yeah, I know, we’re in Costa Rica, not Columbia.
But still, it’s a good story, just leaving out a few details along the way.
As for the tour itself, we were paired with another couple from Panama, so our guide was having to give each of his speeches twice, once in English, and a second time in Spanish.
He was good in that he alternated which version he led with, giving each couple fairly equal time as the ones having to wait while the other couple received their explanation of whatever we were looking at.
And there was a lot to look at.
We started with the seedlings.
They have a running number of seedlings, from barely poking their stem above the dirt to almost ready to plant in a permanent location.
Not only does this give them a ready exhibit to show of the developmental stages of a coffee plant, it also provides them with a steady stream of new plants to take the place of any that need to be replaced.
They also had a large sign showing the parts of the fruit, and how each fruit contains two beans.
Except when they don’t, only he didn’t bring up that detail at this stage in the tour.
He would leave that until we got into the warehouse.
In between, we were shown the collection house, where the freshly harvested beans are dumped into a large bin, which feeds them directly into a sorting system, where the beans are separated according to their size.
This was the start of the processing plant, where the beans are sorted, separated, extracted from the fruit, dried, and finally packaged into the large burlap bags for distributing to their customers.
Except for those that they keep for themselves.
It was here, in the warehouse, that they showed us the different grades of beans.
Including the Peaberry beans, where a fruit only produces a single bean.
Those are the ones that they value most highly, as all of the flavor the fruit produces is concentrated into a single bean.
They even showed us the different grades of roasting.
They didn’t show us the actual roasting, that takes place in a different building.
But they had a display of the different roasting types that they do themselves, and told us all about the differences.
And we learned that the darker the roast, the less caffeine the beans have.
It seems that caffeine is part of the liquid contents of the coffee beans, so the longer they are roasted, the more of that liquid is baked out, resulting in coffee with less of a jolt.
Keep that in mind next time you order a dark roast because you want your coffee strong.
It’s only the flavor that is stronger.
Which is perfectly all right.
It’s all a matter of your priorities, flavor or caffeine.
Me, I usually prefer the flavor.
I figure that if I drink enough of the stuff, I’ll get the caffeine I need.
And of course the tour ended in their gift shop, where we had the opportunity to taste the different blends that they had for sale.
A ‘try before you buy’ sort of thing.
And of course we couldn’t leave without buying a few bags of the Peaberry.
After all, if it’s their best stuff, and they keep it all for themselves, then of course that’s what we wanted.
After all, it’s the things that are normally off limits that are the most desirable.
The forbidden fruit, so to speak.
And yes, it was totally worth it.
For more photos of the Doka Estate, click here.
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