BGuthrie Photos: Costa Rica -- Alajuela -- Doka Estate Coffee Tour

Costa Rica -- Alajuela -- Doka Estate Coffee Tour:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: Two visits including a drive-by on the day before the real tour.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.133.156.156 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] DOKA_070531_02.JPG	[2] DOKA_070531_05.JPG	[3] DOKA_070531_12.JPG
[4] DOKA_070531_16.JPG	[5] DOKA_070531_21.JPG	[6] DOKA_070601_002.JPG
[7] DOKA_070601_007.JPG	[8] DOKA_070601_010.JPG	[9] DOKA_070601_013.JPG
[10] DOKA_070601_014.JPG	[11] DOKA_070601_015.JPG	[12] DOKA_070601_017.JPG
[13] DOKA_070601_019.JPG	[14] DOKA_070601_026.JPG	[15] DOKA_070601_028.JPG
[16] DOKA_070601_031.JPG	[17] DOKA_070601_034.JPG	[18] DOKA_070601_041.JPG
[19] DOKA_070601_045.JPG	[20] DOKA_070601_050.JPG	[21] DOKA_070601_055.JPG
[22] DOKA_070601_061.JPG	[23] DOKA_070601_065.JPG	[24] DOKA_070601_074.JPG
[25] DOKA_070601_077.JPG	[26] DOKA_070601_078.JPG	[27] DOKA_070601_083.JPG
[28] DOKA_070601_087.JPG	[29] DOKA_070601_091.JPG	[30] DOKA_070601_093.JPG
[31] DOKA_070601_099.JPG	[32] DOKA_070601_102.JPG	[33] DOKA_070601_104.JPG
[34] DOKA_070601_112.JPG	[35] DOKA_070601_114.JPG	[36] DOKA_070601_117.JPG
[37] DOKA_070601_123.JPG	[38] DOKA_070601_126.JPG	[39] DOKA_070601_130.JPG
[40] DOKA_070601_136.JPG	[41] DOKA_070601_142.JPG	[42] DOKA_070601_161.JPG
[43] DOKA_070601_163.JPG	[44] DOKA_070601_165.JPG	[45] DOKA_070601_167.JPG
[46] DOKA_070601_172.JPG	[47] DOKA_070601_176.JPG	[48] DOKA_070601_180.JPG
[49] DOKA_070601_183.JPG	[50] DOKA_070601_188.JPG	[51] DOKA_070601_192.JPG
[52] DOKA_070601_194.JPG	[53] DOKA_070601_198.JPG	[54] DOKA_070601_200.JPG
[55] DOKA_070601_204.JPG	[56] DOKA_070601_214.JPG	[57] DOKA_070601_217.JPG
[58] DOKA_070601_228.JPG	[59] DOKA_070601_230.JPG	[60] DOKA_070601_234.JPG
[61] DOKA_070601_236.JPG	[62] DOKA_070601_240.JPG	[63] DOKA_070601_248.JPG
[64] DOKA_070601_253.JPG	[65] DOKA_070601_259.JPG	[66] DOKA_070601_262.JPG
[67] DOKA_070601_272.JPG	[68] DOKA_070601_282.JPG	[69] DOKA_070601_292.JPG
[70] DOKA_070601_299.JPG	[71] DOKA_070601_304.JPG	[72] DOKA_070601_306.JPG
[73] DOKA_070601_310.JPG	[74] DOKA_070601_312.JPG	[75] DOKA_070601_318.JPG
[76] DOKA_070601_320.JPG	[77] DOKA_070601_324.JPG	[78] DOKA_070601_327.JPG
[79] DOKA_070601_330.JPG	[80] DOKA_070601_337.JPG	[81] DOKA_070601_340.JPG
[82] DOKA_070601_343.JPG	[83] DOKA_070601_355.JPG	[84] DOKA_070601_358.JPG
[85] DOKA_070601_359.JPG	[86] DOKA_070601_377.JPG	[87] DOKA_070601_381.JPG
[88] DOKA_070601_386.JPG	[89] DOKA_070601_392.JPG	[90] DOKA_070601_400.JPG
[91] DOKA_070601_414.JPG	[92] DOKA_070601_423.JPG	[93] DOKA_070601_435.JPG
[94] DOKA_070601_438.JPG	[95] DOKA_070601_448.JPG	[96] DOKA_070601_451.JPG
[97] DOKA_070601_455.JPG	[98] DOKA_070601_464.JPG	[99] DOKA_070601_467.JPG
[100] DOKA_070601_473.JPG	[101] DOKA_070601_479.JPG	[102] DOKA_070601_480.JPG
[103] DOKA_070601_483.JPG	[104] DOKA_070601_484.JPG	[105] DOKA_070601_487.JPG
[106] DOKA_070601_490.JPG	[107] DOKA_070601_493.JPG	[108] DOKA_070601_494.JPG
[109] DOKA_070601_498.JPG	[110] DOKA_070601_500.JPG	[111] DOKA_070601_503.JPG
[112] DOKA_070601_507.JPG	[113] DOKA_070601_513.JPG	[114] DOKA_070601_515.JPG
[115] DOKA_070601_518.JPG	[116] DOKA_070601_522.JPG	[117] DOKA_070601_526.JPG
[118] DOKA_070601_527.JPG	[119] DOKA_070601_532.JPG	[120] DOKA_070601_535.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. DOKA_070601_200.JPG: Station #1: Coffee receiving
2. DOKA_070601_228.JPG: Station #2: Coffee Peeling
3. DOKA_070601_318.JPG: Station #4: Mechanical coffee drying
4. DOKA_070601_358.JPG: Station #7: Sun Drying Coffee
Description of Subject Matter: The Doka Estate Coffee Tour is a private tourist resort that offers the visitor and unforgettable experience on a plantation unique for its technology and coffee process. A visit to our plantation will provide you with knowledge about the different methods of cultivation; the opportunity to be exposed to the manual harvesting of coffee (from October to February) and how the different variable will make an excellent quality coffee:
* Altitude: 4500 feet above sea level
* The volcanic soils
* Average temperature: 78 degrees
* The coffee plant: Coffea Arabica
All these ingredients have made us recipients of the award to the best coffee in the world two years in a row.
Doka Coffee processing plant (mill) founded at the beginning of the last century, is the oldest hydro powered processing plant (wet mill) in Costa Rica, for this reason it was declared: Historical and Architectural Heritage by the Costa Rican Government in June of 2003.
The processing plant still functions as efficiently as when it was first built. Here you can access the transportation methods used for the coffee beans and the different stages of the process such as peeling, selection, and fermentation.
The visit continues at the drying patios, where the hot sun rays and the careful attention of our workers help us to obtain the right balance between nature and science, this gives our coffee its unique aroma, boy and flavor.
Finally, at the roasting shop, you can discover the secrets that determine the incomparable quality of our different roasts.
(The above information was from the Doka brochure. Their web site is http://www.dokaestate.com )

The Doka Estate, located on the lower slopes of the Volcan Poas, was established in 1929. Owned by the family of the founder, Don Clorindo Vargas, it has six square miles of coffee bushes. The permanent staff is about 200 but during the picking season (October through January), they bring in 3,000 temporary workers, mostly from Nicaragua, to pick the beans. Doka sells much of its output five years in advance to Starbucks Coffee. They say they restrict the amount sold to Starbucks because they don't want to be totally dependent on them.
The guide mentioned that the growing season had changed dramatically over the years, and he blamed it on global warming. He said the beans here were ripening earlier now, at a time with rain (bad for the beans) and a time when the laborers were busy picking other crops (they also pick pineapples and such). The prime growing areas were now higher elevations which were harder to afford now. They were worried about the future of the crop. Coffee, at one point, had been the primary industry in Costa Rica. It has now dropped considerably -- falling behind tourism (the leading industry) and microchips (Intel has a major plant here). Pineapple is also a major crop here.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].