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.
