Doppio tostado anyone?

Muscles

From Too Much Coffee forum back in 2005:

Peeze coffee roasters in Arnhem, Holland do advertize with doppio tostado (double roasting) they claim it is the only right way to roast coffee for Itlian style espresso's.

Any experience with or opinions on double roasting?

Where are you Jeff?

askthecoffeeguy

might work with rubusta but im not sure who'd want to dfrink it except for the italians and the french  :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Kelsey

Robusta cops a lot of flak, but I've had several espressos over at Bezzera from Chris' imported robusta roast. I've been surprised each time that they survived the transport at all and even more surprised at what a decent coffee they make. Not entirely to my taste, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at it in a cafe.

FreshCoffee2

on 1327996661:

Any experience with or opinions on double roasting?

It depends entirely on the individual's idea of a particular coffee roasted in a particular way by a particular roaster on a particular roasting machine and not much else. One of my roaster colleagues swears by the method and double roasts everything. But the technique used by that roaster, on the roasting equipment being used, may turn out an entiely different character if it was double roasted on other equipment. And even the technique itself is open to the differing roasters technique of doing so. Do any roasters that employ a double roasting technique do it in the same way? And who's to say that the character of a coffee double roasted in a particular way on a particular machine, may not end up similar to the same coffee single roasted in a different way on another machine?????? Cant honestly therefore answer the question, notwithstanding that it is an interesting topic and as a very wise coffee roaster once asked me in reply to a question I asked him......."you try" ! For my money is it is a hell of a lot of work for.......what gain? Only an individual can answer that!

UNM

Two separate things here (appropriate really). 1. Don't be dissing robusta. It is different, but that doesn't make it bad. Just because a crop has higher yields doesn't make it bad (Full disclosure: I like robusta). 2. Double roasting. My experience is that it doesn't work (only tried with Arabica). I does not double, or even quadruple the complexity of roasting, it completely changes the game. I am certain you can make coffee beans immeasurably better or worse by double roasting them, but storage and time between roasts are also an issue.  My limited experience has been of restarting 'failed' roasts.   If I had the time and inclination, I'd do some basic experiments with a drying first roast, then full second roast,with varying rest periods between, through to a full first roast with a 'refresher' at various times prior to extracting. I reckon thirty years or so of work should yield good data for others to build on. Tell ya what though - if someone wants to collate data and needs volunteers, I'm happy to do a few test roasts just to see what happens and contribute to the knowledge base.

FreshCoffee2

There are high quality robustas and low quality robustas, and it is exactly the same with arabicas. Before formalising my forward contracts for the supply of greens, I personally sample and reject enough FAQ good quality arabicas because they dont fit my idea of what I want from my blends.....These are the same coffees that other roasters accept for use in their blends...... They on the other hand may reject the coffees that I specifiy and accept, because they may not see the point in spending the extra cost for little gain for their market and for what they are doing. So it goes both ways. The point I am making is that "quality" can up to a point be subjective for each individual, and there is a place for all origins and qualities of coffee including the much but unfairly maligned robusta. A specialty roaster may use selected quality robustas to achieve a particular result in his blends and they are therefore most useful, while another roaster may simply use the cheapest coffees he can find irrespective of whether they are robustas or arabicas, to keep his mix cost to the bare minimum for the market that he is pitching to, where such a (loe end) blend may be all that is required.... Incidentally, did any of you know that low end arabicas are just as diabolical as low end robustas..... For the rest of it......I would like to introduce the concept here that to plug that any particular brand coffee has been "double roasted" and to say that it is the only true way of roasting italian (or whatever) style blends......is also a very useful way for someone to try and get as much mileage as they can out of what is basically an unusual concept....same as people that plug that wood fired roasting is the only true way etc etc etc. There is nothing wrong with them wanting to get as much mileage as they can out of what they do......but the consumers need to think about what that does or does not mean when they actually cup the result. If the coffee is good, that's great. If the coffee is nothing special, the marketing aspect of this has failed.....but it probably got you to try that brand coffee in the first place so it worked in some way! Even the use of a european language to describe the practice of "double roasting" ("doppio tostado") is a marketing tool because it seems to give the phrase much more image in english speaking markets than to use the ordinary english phrase. And that of course is quite separate to the question of quality in the resulting brew, and totally irrelevant to the concept of whether it is the only "true" way of doing anything....... Pedantic and analytical to the last  All of that said, I would be very interested to hear more from any commercial roasters that double roast.