Coffee gifts for firefighters

Buy for the watch, not for one person

A fire station kitchen runs on a shared pot. Somebody puts it on, everybody helps themselves, and the coffee usually comes out of a mess fund people pay into. Hand one 250g bag to one person on a watch of five and it is gone by the end of the second shift.

So the useful gift here is quantity, and the useful address is the station. Four 250g bags is a kilo, which is £66 for four bags at £16.50. It goes as four separate packs rather than one parcel, and it is still there on day three when the watch that took delivery hands over to the next one.

Address it so it lands in the right room. Station address, watch name on the line above it. Coffee addressed to the mess room tends to get opened by whoever is in the kitchen. Coffee addressed to one named person waits until that person is next on.

• 250g, £16.50 — one person, at home. Roughly sixteen mugs.
• 500g, £33 — one person who drinks a lot of it, or a two-person kitchen.
• 1kg, four bags at £16.50, £66 — a watch. About eleven 1.5 litre jugs.
• Ten bags, £140 — the Coffee Club, which works out at £14 a bag, with an eleventh credited to a mess room you nominate.

How much coffee does a watch actually get through?

Do the arithmetic before you buy. It works whoever you buy from, and it is the difference between a gift that lasts a shift and one that lasts a rota.

A common filter ratio is 60g of ground coffee per litre of water. A 1.5 litre jug is therefore about 90g, which makes a 250g bag not quite three jugs. A kilo is about eleven. Put three jugs on across a busy day and a kilo is three or four days, less if the neighbouring watch helps itself, which it does.

Plenty of station kitchens have no filter machine at all — a kettle, a cafetière and a jar of instant. Same ratio: 60g per litre, so a three-mug cafetière takes about 45g. If that is the setup, order it ground for cafetière. We grind any bag to whatever you ask for at the same price as whole bean. Charging extra to grind coffee is a strange thing to do.

Two things spoil more station coffee than the coffee ever does. A jug left sitting on a hotplate keeps cooking and after half an hour it tastes like it, so take it off and tip it into an insulated flask or an airpot. And keep the bag rolled shut in a cupboard rather than the fridge, which is full of moisture and the smell of everyone's lunch.

Every bag will carry the roast date on the front with a 12-month best-before beside it, both labelled so you can tell which is which. That matters more for a gift than for anything else you buy. You can see exactly what you are handing over, and so can they.

• 60g of ground coffee per litre of water — a common filter ratio.
• A 1.5 litre jug: about 90g.
• A 250g bag: not quite three jugs.
• A kilo: about eleven jugs.
• A three-mug cafetière: about 45g.
• A 250g bag by the mug: roughly sixteen.

Picks, £6 to £140, including things we don't sell

Everything below is either ours at our price or something we do not sell and will not pretend to. Where the honest answer is buy that from somebody else, that is the answer printed.

Coffee is a pre-order. Kit is made to order and goes out within 10 working days.

• Four 250g bags for the watch£66

  A kilo at £16.50 a bag, split however you like between the two blends in the first roast. Roughly eleven jugs, so it is still there after the first shift.

• Coffee Club, ten 250g bags£140

  Works out at £14 a bag, and the tenth is credited to a mess room you nominate. A one-off run, not a rolling subscription.

• Blue Light Blend, 250g£16.50

  Medium-dark, and intended to be low in acidity so it goes flat rather than sour if it sits. The profile we are roasting towards: dark chocolate, toasted hazelnut, cedar.

• Graveyard Blend, 250g£16.50

  The darker of the two, and the one with robusta in it: 15% by weight of the green coffee before roasting, which will be printed on the pack rather than buried.

• Insulated flask£28

  Gets the jug off the hotplate before it keeps cooking.

• Beanie£18

  For the walk to the car in February. It does one job.

• Mug£12

  For the person who already owns a mug and defends it.

• Stickers and patch£6

  The cheapest thing here. Ends up on a locker door.

• A burr grinder (we don't sell one)

  If the station has beans and a blade grinder, a burr grinder is the upgrade worth making. Any kitchen shop or catering supplier.

• A replacement jug for the station filter machine (we don't sell one)

  Plenty of stations have one that is cracked or scorched and nobody gets round to replacing it. A catering supplier should be able to match the model.

• A three-litre airpot (we don't sell one)

  Keeps a brew hot without a hotplate cooking it.

• Decaf, from somebody who has it

  We have none. Off Duty is planned as a decaf with the caffeine taken out using water rather than solvents, and it is not roasting at launch. If decaf is the gift, buy it elsewhere today.

• Money into the mess fund

  Unromantic, and probably the most useful thing on this page. Costs you a bank transfer and buys whatever the kitchen is actually short of.

Gifts and hospitality: check the service's own policy

Fire and rescue services are public bodies and each one sets its own policy on gifts and hospitality. Values, declaration thresholds and what has to be written in a register are decided locally and differ between services. We are not printing a number here, because any number we printed would be wrong somewhere.

The straightforward way round it is to stop making it a personal gift. Coffee sent to the station kitchen for the watch to share is a different proposition from coffee sent to a named officer. It still remains the recipient's call, not ours, so if you are unsure, ask them. They know their own policy better than a coffee company does.

If you are buying for your partner, your mate or your dad, none of this applies. It is a bag of coffee going to a house.

What we have roasted so far: nothing

BlueLightCoffeeCo is pre-launch. Nothing has been roasted, nothing has shipped, and there are no reviews on this site because there are no customers yet. Every order is a pre-order. You pay when checkout opens, we buy the green, and we roast it. Cancel any time before it ships and you get all of your money back, no reason needed.

We have never been to a farm. Not one. We will buy the green coffee through a UK importer and roast it here in small batches, and you will not find a photograph on this site of a hillside we have never stood on.

Two blends are in the first roast. Blue Light Blend is medium-dark. Graveyard Blend is the dark one, the same idea plus 15% Indian robusta by weight of the green coffee before roasting, which will be declared on the pack. Handover Blend, named after the changeover pot two crews share, follows the first roast rather than joining it.

Delivery is free across the UK while we launch, UK addresses only for now. The 250g packs are being sized to post as large letters on a tracked 48-hour service. We are not telling you they go through a letterbox until a finished pack has been measured. Kit is made to order and dispatched within 10 working days.

The tenth bag

Every ten 250g bags sold send 250g to a UK emergency services mess room. Forty bags send a full kilo. We expect that to come to around 100kg in the first year. That figure is a projection, not a cap: sell past the plan and the tenth bag keeps going, still one in ten.

Credits accumulate and ship in consolidated runs once a station's share reaches 4kg, addressed to the mess room rather than to a person. Stations self-certify, which means somebody at the station confirms they work there. We publish bags earned and bags delivered with an "as at" date. The two numbers will not always match, and we always say why.

The counter is at zero. It stays at zero until the first bag ships. We are not putting an invented number on a website and hoping nobody checks it.