Good morning and welcome to today’s review. Today I’m checking out Fire Dept. Coffee’s original Medium Roast, the coffee that started it all for this company. Let’s dive in!
Purchase this coffee directly for $12.99/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Skull Crushing Espresso
FIRE DEPT. COFFEE ORIGINAL MEDIUM ROAST
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. 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. Their Skull Crushing Espresso I reviewed recently was a super dark (French or Italian roast) blend and so I’m curious to check out their Medium Roast.
While Skull Crushing Espresso had a cool name and artwork on it’s bag, Medium Roast comes in a pleasant, but understated red bag with no graphics. According to the FDC website, “this delicious blend is where it all began for Fire Department Coffee” so this must be the original blend they offered for sale. It’s a blend of Central and South American coffees and that’s all we know from the website. Opening the bag, this looks like a dark roast to me, with very dark brown beans that are mostly covered in a sheen of oil. I did a fine espresso grind and tested these beans on my Espresso Vision Roast Vision, which uses light-sensitive electronics to assess the color of a roast and places it on a scale of 0-35. The smaller the number, the darker the roast. I got about equal quantities of 9, 10 and 11, and the RV has a standard deviation of 1, so we’d be safe calling this a “10.” Roast Vision’s scale considers 9-10 “dark” and 11 is the low end of “medium dark.” These convert to a 53-59 on the Agtron scale, which is more of an industry standard, I believe. Visual inspection is just one measure of roast level, but based on this I would call this a dark roast. I already know from spending time on FDC’s website and experiencing their Skull Crushing Espresso that they cater to a darker roast-loving customer base with an emphasis on using coffee as an energy boost and vehicle for caffeine, so I’m not surprised. Words like “light,” “medium” and “dark” are in the eye of the beholder, anyway, but when roasters are going for more of a “mainstream” coffee drinking clientele I have noticed the spectrum shifts toward the dark end whereas “third wave” roasters tend to shift it the other way. Regardless, all that oil indicates this coffee rolled through second crack and, in my book, anything that makes it into or beyond second crack is a dark roast. It’s all about the taste, though, so let’s see what we have here.
For my filter cups, I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed and I use a Knock Aergrind for my pourover grinder. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time, bloom included, was 3:25. The dry grounds look like ground up Oreos, so they are more or less black. The aroma from the brewing was mostly carbon and very dark sugars. Funny enough I was writing this review this morning and my wife, who isn’t a coffee drinker AT ALL, came into the closed office (trying not to wake her up because I am such a nice guy! LOL) and she said, “That smells kind of… I don’t know… smoky…”
Taking a sip, this is a medium+ to heavy- bodied coffee and carbon, roast, and very dark caramelization are the first things to hit my palate, not surprisingly. Coffee is like any other food that as you “cook” it longer (roast it, in this case), at a certain point the flavors are less about the coffee itself and more from the roast. You can take two very different steaks, for example, and if you cook them rare or medium rare, you can taste differences, but if you took them both to well done, they’re going to pretty much be the same. Coffee is like this, too, and the closer a coffee comes to second crack, and definitely if it’s roasted beyond that, it’s more about the roast characteristics and there is usually very little of the nuance of the coffee’s origins left behind to detect. That being said, a GOOD dark roast is not an easy thing to create, so there is still an art to dark roasting coffee and it’s not as simple as it may seem if you haven’t tried it. As this cup cools I’m getting some nice sweetness that reminds me of a marshmallow that was slightly burned over a campfire. There’s a lot of sweetness, accompanied by some char. I’m getting a hint of caramel apple here, too, in the cool cup. There is really no acidity to speak of in this coffee as lighter roasts tend to accentuate the high notes in a coffee, mostly the acids that create fruity notes and these mostly burn off as the roast is extended. There’s a little smoke in the second half of the sip and this coffee reminds me of the body and mouthfeel of whole milk. It’s a dense coffee that really sits on my palate and coats everything, probably because of the amount of sugar development that happens in these darker roasts. I like an occasional dark roast and this Medium Roast from FDC fits the bill as a good one, in my book. On a cold, dark morning like we’re having in Kansas City today, it’s perfect, and coffees like this are great vehicles for sugar and dairy, which is why these appeal to the average coffee drinker in this country who doesn’t take it black. This would be a good work coffee, with the flavors that non-cork sniffers like and are familiar but elevated quite a bit above your basic grocery store megabrands at the same time.
I tried this coffee out as espresso, too, as I figured a roast and blend like this would land in the “traditional Roman” category or close to it, for me, and I do love a traditional, short pull like the ones I remember from my teen years when my family lived in Italy. I’m using a Quick Mill Carola Evo espresso machine and this time I reached for my Orphan Espresso Lido E grinder. I am using a bottomless portafilter with an IMS 16/20 precision basket and a 58.5mm Decent Espresso tamper. This is a pretty forgiving coffee on the espresso machine. I made several shots from the sub-1:1 range all the way to closer to a 1:2 and they were heavy bodied with a lot of roast and a decent amount of toasted marshmallow sweetness, too. 18-18.5g is the top dose for this basket that I could use without killing the headroom, and coming in around 30g of espresso in the cup at 25-27 seconds was pretty ideal. Not a super exciting ‘spro, but definitely traditional-ish for people who want something that reminds them of the home country! This would be a really nice espresso for sugar, the way most Romans took it when I lived there at least, or as a decadent Cuban cafecito.