Today at the Doka Estate Coffee Tour in Alajuela we learned about the coffee process that Doka specifically uses and how they basically do everything manually with not too much of an emphasis on recent technology machines. I was surprised with the fact that they have to wait 3 years before they can begin their first harvest; I would have thought it would be a shorter process.

When testing out the coffee beans, they drop 10 cahuelas (25 pounds of fresh picked, ripe, red coffee berries) are dropped into a water basin for a sink test; if the bean sinks it is a good one that they will use towards roasting coffee beans but has to go through another round of selection. While 25 pounds may seem like a lot for 1 cahuela, after the entire process, the total drops to 5 pounds. With the second selection process, there comes to be around 85% high quality beans, 10% medium quality and 5% low quality.

It was interesting to see how much they rely on natural labor at Doka because they make it known that their branding is their quality of coffee. To ensure that they are the leaders of competition, everything is hand picked and processed to the best qualities. They rely mostly on old fashioned technology because most of the machines there have been standing and working for around 100 years now. While it may guarantee the finest quality, it may not be the most efficient however they seem to be generating lots of revenue from their old fashioned ways.

Personally, I am not the biggest coffee fan but each different roast tasted yummy to me. I can see why they are so big on their branding of hand-picking, and going through the process themselves because it truly shows their authenticity.