Coffee Options for the Trail

hey y'all Dixie here today I want to talk to you about the nectar of the Gods which is coffee and I want to talk about coffee on trail and this is like a perfect day for talking about coffee on trail because it's like gross and Misty and that's my favorite type of mornin to sit and have a hot cup of coffee now I know a lot of you probably think that instant coffee is like the only way to go on trail while it is probably the loudest and most convenient form of having coffee on trail it isn't the only reasonable option you know there there are some other options that I'll talk about today but to get started I am gonna cover instant coffee because that is what I chose to do on trail now you can do instant coffee whether you're doing stove lists or you're planning to carry a stove so instant coffee will mix up with water okay if you just need that you know fix whether you have it with hot water or cold water myself I carried a stove so I like to have a warm cup of coffee it just was like liquid motivation in the morning for me so what I would do is just bowl 8 ounces of water and dump my little instant coffee packet into my cup and then I don't necessarily love black coffee I will do that to get my coffee fix but I prefer to mix it with something my mixer of choice is carnation breakfast essentials for on-trail some of the towns that you might go through if you're doing a through hack won't necessarily have that option I mean sometimes your resupplying at a general store or even a gas station so while they might not have breakfast essentials you might be able to find some hot chocolate to mix it with if you're going on a shorter hack like section hack or you know you're out for a few days something like that you will be able to you know carry whatever you choose to carry from home but and on a thru-hike you can always send yourself some of this stuff ahead it's just me personally I don't like going through all that trouble so I just deal with what I can find along the trail my all-time favorite mixer is powdered milk and honey because in normal life I like to put milk and honey and like cinamon so on trail I really love if I can emulate that now honey can be a little heavy so what I would do is to justify carrying that much weight I would try to implement it into other stuff so my food or maybe I would carry herbal tea also to have in the evenings but for lunch maybe in the stretch where I carried honey I'd have some tortilla and peanut butter and honey for lunch and or dinner now an instance is where I was trying to do as many miles as I could in a stretch as fast as I could or say like the 24 hour challenge then I would still carry the instant coffee still some of the same mixers and I just put it in like a Gatorade bottle or something like that and shake it up with some water and while it was cold and not as tasty to me you can still have coffee even if you're gonna go Stovall is some of the common little instant coffee packets that you might find along the way are gonna be like Taster's Choice or Folgers those aren't the greatest you might come across in Starbucks vias in some of the larger towns that you go to again this is stuff that you can send yourself ahead if you're gonna be through hacking but I just learned to appreciate whatever I could find because sometimes you can't even find like the single packets and you might have to get like a container of instant coffee and just put it in a ziploc bag I think my favorite instant coffee that I came across is café Bustelo and I didn't find that a whole lot in the singles packets but for the price versus the taste I think that that was kind of the best deal they are cheaper than the Starbuck vias and honestly I think I might even like them a little bit better but I had a lot of Starbuck via over the period of three different trails so maybe I'm just a little burn out on those but Starbucks does tend to be a favorite among hackers if you look online you can find all sorts of brands of instant coffee some are gonna be a little more pricey than others but oftentimes with coffee you do get what you pay for I like the little cappuccino packets that I could find sometimes again usually Starbucks and then Trader Joe's also has these little convenient packets that comes with the coffee cream and sugar if you like that another option that's kind of one step up or maybe like a half step up from instant coffee is the Folgers singles that's the only brand that I ever noticed them in so it looks like little teabags but it's got coffee in it so you just steep it in a hot cup of water like you would a tea bag sometimes those were available in towns and sometimes they were not it is pretty much just as convenient as the instant coffee packets but you do have a little bit more trash to deal with with that little tea coffee bag so if you're just looking for maybe the coffee taste and the the kick in the butt of caffeine then there is the option of espresso beans and you know you could do that as an addition to the coffee you're already gonna have every day or it could be if you're aiming to go stove list now we'll say we did have some troubles on trail with espresso beans if we were in the desert or in warmer weather because it seemed that all of the chocolate would melt and then it would cool off and harden by morning so then there was just like this brick of chocolaty espresso bean goodness and then you'd have to like knock off a piece of it to get some of the espresso beans but yeah espresso beans are a good option for the coffee taste the caffeine boost without having to deal with mixin hot or cold coffee now I'm going to talk about some of the options that aren't instant or instant lack I'm talk about my friend perc who if y'all have watched the through hacks of the ATP CT or CDT that I have up here on YouTube you might recognize him I met him on the Appalachian Trail and his trail name is perc because he carried a percolator now this is a great way to have coffee and make friends while you're through hiking and on a larger trail like the 80 it makes more sense so he would oftentimes make some coffee on the fire in the mornings and then share it with everybody now he carried a percolator which is a lot heavier than most people want to have in a luxury item especially for coffee but it is an idea if you love coffee and you like the idea of the percolator he used an lumen percolator he never did weigh it but it was not an enameled one you know it was just like the plain aluminum so it was pretty light in the world of percolators on the PCT perc decided to step it up a notch and he went with the Aeropress when she says with the little metal screen that you can get like third party I guess the Aeropress company does not actually sell it they just sell filters so he used a little metal screen thing so he could use it over and over and over and with that screen and the Aeropress itself he said it was seven ounces so lighter than the percolator I'm sure still a little heavy but again if you are really into coffee and you want a good cup of coffee the Aeropress was amazing perk did say that when he originally started out with the filters if you are careful with them and dry them out he said he could get about four uses out of one of the little filters so just something to think about if if you don't want to get the the metal screen and you're wanting to use the paper filters Burke said that his favorite coffee to make in the Aeropress like he tried several different types of coffee he tried several different temperatures and he said that the perfect setup in his opinion for the Aeropress for coffee on trail is to get café Bustelo coffee grounds and to have the water at a hundred and eighty-five degrees and I'm serious he carried a thermometer and tested and you know tried to figure out the level of acidity and everything with temperature and just what kind of gave the best taste so that's what he said was the best set up Burke says even though you've got the extra contraption the Aeropress is actually pretty easy to clean up if you wanted to not carry a pot and a mug he carried titanium mug that he would just heat water with and if you were gonna fix only like backpacker meals or you were gonna cook in Ziploc freezer bags that you could get by with just having the mug with Aeropress so you would just heat up your water and then pour it in and then pressure coffee into that same titanium so just an option if because you're carrying a little bit of extra weight with Aeropress you don't also want to carry a mug and a pot and I guess you could just carry the pot and not the mug and drink out of the pot so options and on the CDT for science perk decided to try something different and he went with a pour-over method he used a little por ver device it was the GS a brand he got it at or yeah the pour-over weighed less than an ounce I think it was like 0.4 ounces it's got three little legs that attach to whatever your mug of choice is I like to use the sea2summit perky's is a titanium mug but anyway the little legs attached to the top of your cup and then in the mesh cup that's above your cup you put the coffee grounds and then pour hot water over it now perc also tried to see if it gave like a faster flow rate he tried boiling water and mixing the coffee grounds and then pouring that slurry mixture into the pour over and just to see if it would go any faster and he found that it did not now with the pour over method I found that the coffee was a good bit colder by the time it finally filtered through and for myself having a warm cup of coffee is half the reason that I'm doing it so I didn't necessarily love that about it but it was still good and to me it still tasted better than instant so to kind of compare and contrast the three different methods that perc used I think that my favorite of those three would be the Aeropress because it seemed to take a little bit less time than the percolator and also definitely the pour over and so if I was going to go with something other than instant that is what I would choose it does obviously take a little bit longer than instant but perc said that the Aeropress was real easy to clean out so it wasn't that part that took a while it was more of the setup beforehand it tasted a lot better than the instant you know all three of the methods that perky's in my opinion tastes better than instant because you're using you know actual coffee grounds I decided to look at outdoor gear lab and see what they said on some of the methods of making coffee and they actually had the Aeropress on there as a pick they said that the taste just was not raveled by any other method now they mentioned some pour-over methods those might be better you know have a faster flow rate I don't know I've never tried those all of these different contraptions I've talked about today I will put a link to in the video details so if you want to learn more about any of these you can find them there I personally will continue to go with instant just because it's easy and to me it's not worth the weight of having seven extra ounces for the Aeropress but if I was to try something else that's probably what I would go with I'm sure that you could take a poll of like a hundred different hackers and they would all have different preferred types of coffee ways to make it and you know probably nobody would agree exactly with another person so I'd love for y'all to share what your preference of coffee is the way you like to fix it what brands you like if you've even done like perk and figured out temperatures that work well please feel free to share all of that in the comments below and that is all I have for y'all today thank you so much for watching and we will see y'all next time

Channel: Homemade Wanderlust

Views: 96,388

Rating: 4.9532089 out of 5

Keywords: travel, hiking, backpacking, hike, gear, adventure, fun, story, Appalachian, Trail, PCT, CDT, thru-hike, Auburn, Alabama, epic, climbing, canyon, national, nature, mountains, update, park, lake, trail, tents, camping, summer, University, Aubie, River, stream, Mountains, National, Scenic

Id: 4ygLsSz4YCk

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018