Coffee gifts for emergency services

Who are you buying for?

Pick the closest one. Each page covers the shape of that week, and what gets used rather than put in a drawer. If none of them fits — control room, security, haulage, anyone on a four-on-four-off — the night shift page is the general one.

• Gifts for police officers

  For a relief on nights, and a flask that has to survive a car boot.

• Gifts for nurses and NHS staff

  Long days, one kettle in the kitchen, a fridge everyone shares.

• Gifts for firefighters

  Watch-sized. Whatever you send gets shared out across the watch.

• Gifts for paramedics and ambulance crews

  For a crew who brew on standby or not at all.

• Night shift gifts

  For everyone on nights who is not in a service.

Gifts and hospitality policies

Whoever you are buying for, the same thing sits underneath it. UK forces, trusts and services run their own gifts and hospitality policies, and they differ. Check the one that covers the person you are buying for — they will know where it lives.

We are not going to print a figure that makes it fine. Nobody selling you a bag of coffee is in a position to set that number, and we are not going to write copy that helps anyone work around a policy their employer wrote for a reason.

What we do instead is send coffee to mess rooms rather than to people. Every ten 250g bags sold send 250g to a UK emergency services mess room. Forty bags send a full kilo. It is a target we hold to at any volume rather than a cap: sell past the plan and the tenth bag keeps going, still one in ten. It will be addressed to the mess room, not to a person.

The tenth bag is a target, not a cap: sell past the plan and it keeps going, still one in ten. We are not publishing a first-year total, because there is nothing yet to count. The counter starts at zero and moves only when bags ship, and any total we publish will carry the date it was true.

What we sell, and what it costs

Whole bean or any grind, same price. We never charge for grinding. Every bag will carry a roast date on the front next to a 12-month best-before, both labelled.

We have never been to a farm and we are not going to pretend we have. Green will be bought through a UK importer and roasted here in small batches. Nothing has been roasted yet, so every description below is what we are aiming for rather than what we have tasted.

• Blue Light Blend — £16.50, 250g. Medium-dark house blend. Target profile: dark chocolate, toasted hazelnut, cedar. In the first roast.
• Graveyard Blend — £16.50, 250g. Dark roast. Target profile: bittersweet chocolate, black treacle, pipe tobacco. The recipe includes robusta, and the proportion will be declared on the pack once it is signed off. In the first roast.
• Handover Blend — £15.50, 250g. Medium-dark, aimed at a wide brewing window for the pot two crews share. Follows.
• First Call Blend — £16.50, 250g. Medium roast. Follows.
• Off Duty Blend — £18.50, 250g. Decaf. Not roasting yet, so not on sale yet.
• Coffee Club — £140. Ten 250g bags at £14 a bag, all ten to you. Those ten bags are what sends one 250g bag to a station mess room you name, on top of your ten. A one-off run, not a rolling subscription.
• Kit — flask £28, hoodie £42, tee £25, cap £22, beanie £18, mug £12, stickers and patch £6. Made to order, dispatched within 10 working days.

Read the dispatch date before you pay

Everything with coffee in it is a pre-order. You pay now, we buy the green, it gets roasted, and it is a pre-order. Free UK delivery while we launch, UK addresses only, tracked delivery. We are sizing the 250g pack to go through a letterbox rather than need a doorstep handover, and we will not say it fits until a filled pack has been measured.

Cancel any time before it ships and you get all of it back. No reason needed.

If the present has a date on it before the end of October, do not buy coffee from us for it. Buy the kit — made to order, dispatched within 10 working days — or buy something else and come back later. A pre-order confirmation is a poor thing to hand over at a leaving do.

Work out what they brew with before you buy beans

The usual way a coffee present fails is the grind, not the coffee.

If you cannot ask outright, ask what they had this morning and how they made it. Most people describe the machine without noticing.

Then buy small and recent rather than big. A 250g bag drunk in three weeks beats a kilo going stale on top of the fridge. And look for a roast date, not just a best-before: one is the day someone stopped guaranteeing it, the other is the day it left the roaster.

• A filter machine or an urn wants medium-coarse. Too fine and the basket floods.
• A cafetière wants coarse, and about four minutes.
• A moka pot or an espresso machine wants fine.
• A pod machine wants pods. Beans are an ornament.

Things we do not sell that might be the better present

Coffee is not always the answer, and a gift page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

• Socks and boots. Worn out constantly, never replaced voluntarily.
• A vacuum flask with a lid that opens one-handed. Ours is £28. Buy whichever one does that.
• Blackout blinds, for a room that gets full daylight.
• Food that turns up ready to eat rather than needing cooking.
• Nothing, and a question instead. Ask what would actually help that week.