Fire Family Coffee Roasters
As irony would have it, my story starts with a long night of work, one too many bad cups of coffee and YouTube. We had been out all night at a structure fire. The exhilaration of fighting fire that had rushed us out of the station in the middle of the night, had given way to the mundane manual labor of overhauling into the next morning’s sunrise. For those who don’t know, firefighting is a short moment of sheer excitement and adrenaline followed by hours of salvage and overhaul. Cold, wet, sore, and no one is going home until it’s all done. If you’ve ever been exhausted, I mean truly wiped out, the one thing that keeps you moving is keeping something pleasing in your mind. Mine has always been coffee. Hot coffee in the shower. It’s my thing. I knew the exact mug. The glassy ink black fluid through the ribbons of opaque steam. The sting of the heat of the first sip. Shower washes the work off my skin, coffee washes it out of my soul. It gets the heart going and eases the aches from the work. None of what I’ve shared with you can genuinely relay the despair I felt when I filled my mouth that morning with what I can only describe to you as charcoal flavored hot water. The Idea of that cup had carried me through hours of work. To be fair no cup of coffee was going to live up to the image I had built. If someone had distilled sunshine, happiness, and my daughters laugh and served it piping hot then yea. But this coffee wasn’t and I was more than pissed. I didn’t know it at the time but it was a seminal moment in my life where need and purpose met. After expressing my discontent with the person who made this pot. I began asking questions. “Who is responsible for this?” “Why did this coffee suck?” and the real rabbit hole “What is good coffee?” The result………..To be continued
Out of respect for the communities we serve as well as the greater community of emergency services in general, a portion of all of our sales are donated to non-profit organizations that support injured and fallen firefighters, police, EMS personnel, and their families.