Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new-to-me roaster, Fire Dept. Coffee and their Skull-Crushing Espresso!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14.99/12oz
FIRE DEPT. COFFEE SKULL-CRUSHING ESPRESSO
Fire Dept. Coffee was started in Rockford, Illinois in 2016 and is run by firefighters, with 10% of the company’s net proceeds going to the Fire Dept. Coffee Foundation to help first responders who are injured on the job. CEO, Luke Schneider, is a full-time firefighter/paramedic and so is the company’s VP, Jason Patton. I’m always a little nervous about “cause coffee” or companies that have a “gimmick” (not the right word to use, but I can’t think of a better term) like veteran/military, first responder, church-led, etc. because sometimes the coffee takes a back seat to the marketing, but you never know until you try the coffee. Based on spending some time on FDC’s website, it’s clear that this isn’t coffee intended for the cork-sniffers, and that’s OK because not everyone needs to be an aficionado to enjoy something. Many, MANY American coffee drinkers see it as a brown liquid that, for some reason, pairs nicely with loads of sugar, cream, syrups, etc! FDC certainly seems well-realized as a brand, with cohesive imagery, very graphic military and first-responder inspired artwork, and lots of co-branded items that look good and appeal to the target audience, like t-shirts and challenge coins.
The coffee I’m trying out this morning is their Skull-Crushing Espresso, which comes in a bag with bold Day of the Dead inspired graphics. This is a blend of Honduran coffees that FDC says will “wake the dead” and is intended to be brewed as drip or espresso. You know me, if someone sends espresso, it’s going in my espresso machine! Somewhat oddly, the same phrase pops up on every coffee that FDC sells on their site… “It comes in a medium grind. We recommend grinding beans if using an espresso machine.” This phrase has really thrown me for a loop and I’m not sure what it means. For the record, I had FDC send my coffee as whole bean, but I wonder if this statement means they recommend re-grinding the medium grind into a finer grind if using it as espresso? I couldn’t find a date on the bag, so I’m unsure of the age. Opening the bag, these are very darkly roasted beans, in the French to Italian roast, well-past-second-crack range, with big, black beans covered in oil. I ran a bunch of samples on my Espresso Vision Roast Vision, which is an instrument that uses photoreceptors to visually classify a roast on a scale from 0-34. The lower the number, the darker the roast, and I got an even number of 6’s and 7’s, so this is a 6-7, which is DARK, as dark as any coffee I have run through it yet. With a coffee this dark, it’s going to be all about the roast characteristics and not the origin of the beans, so the coffee from these beans will be roasty with some caramelized sugars and probably some cocoa/chocolate leaning notes, but I wouldn’t expect any fruit or much acidity.
For equipment, I’m using an Orphan Espresso Pharos grinder, Quick Mill Carola Evo espresso machine, and an aftermarket naked portafiler with IMS 16/20 precision basket and IMS screen on the machine. You know, real espresso dork equipment! I pulled a variety of shots with this coffee and definitely found I prefer a ristretto style cup over the more standard starting point for modern espresso, which is a 1:2 ratio. What I mean by all that is the usual recommended starting point for espresso is a 1:2 ratio of beans in the portafilter to weight of coffee in the cup in around 27-ish seconds. Again, this is a ballpark starting point for most coffees, not the be-all or end-all of espresso. An example of this type of recipe would be 18g of coffee in the portafilter and getting about 36g in the cup in around 27 seconds, so weighing and timing things is necessary. A ristretto is a traditional Italian style of espresso that uses a much tighter ratio, closer to 1:1 (i.e. 18g in the portafilter, 18g in the cup). I find ristretto style shots tend to work out with really dark coffees, although not always. In this case, ristretto was better tasting for me, by a longshot. I was using 18g in the portafilter and getting shots in the 18.1-18.5g range with a 30-second run time and I liked this. Surprisingly, the crema was thin and the overall body of the shots was surprisingly light, so I suspect this coffee may have a decent amount of age on it. These shots were quite roasty with a fair amount of bittersweet chocolate. Surprisingly light body, as I stated. The aftertaste had a nice graham cracker flavor after about 30 seconds or so. Not a real complex shot or much to write about, but that’s to be expected with a roast as dark as this, the nuances of the Honduran beans will not survive those kinds of temperatures! But, this was a nicely balanced shot and a pleasant throwback to an old style of espresso, which I enjoy. Loosening my grind didn’t do a lot of favors for this coffee. Running 30g in 30 seconds with 18g starting in the portafilter yielded a chalky, dry, bitter-and-not-in-a-good-way shot that was pretty unpleasant, so a tight grind and ratio is the way to go with Skull-Crushing Espresso. I didn’t try this coffee as a filter coffee, which is probably actually how most people would drink it, or maybe in a moka pot. I don’t see a coffee like this as an interest point for “serious” espresso nerds with high-end equipment, but I could see it working for people who just like dark coffee, who use dark roasts as a vehicle for milk and sugar, or who are using it in superautomatics. I have a Saeco superauto at work and those machines tend to grind too coarse, use too small of a dose, and use water that isn’t hot enough (three cardinal sins of espresso in one fell swoop!). Dark roasts tend to work well in superautos, in my opinion, because darker coffees extract more easily than light roasts, so they actually work out OK on such equipment.
Overall, FDC’s Skull-Crushing Espresso isn’t bad if you keep your ratios tight, which, ironically, means using pretty high-end equipment, which also means MOST people with this level of espresso nerdery at home would probably reach for a lighter roast coffee that has more origin character. I would say this coffee is really more for people looking for a dark roast to run on a superauto machine, moka pot or as a filter coffee, or even in a lower-end espresso machine using a pressurized portafilter. That’s where most espresso nerds start their journey, and having good coffee at that level is still really important! I do have some concerns about the age of these coffees, especially if you’re buying it from Amazon or the like, as any coffee without a “roasted on” date could be anywhere from roasted yesterday to roasted a year ago, but when brewed right I found this coffee to be likeable and with some pretty pleasant flavors, even if it wouldn’t be a daily driver, for me.