Have coffee, will travel

#1: Post by **millmountain** » August 31st, 2021, 4:45 am

Ever since coffee prep began to be a kind of hobby to me, with all the usual inordinate amount of thought poured into the various apparatus, I have often wondered about scenarios in which most of that equipment is not available. Maybe not at the level of beans, hammer, stream and fire---Camping and forgot the coffee gear? Zombie apocalypse in Columbia?---but just having a grinder and kettle, maybe even a filter to hand. Cowboy coffee, basically.

Since the espresso machine is in the shop, I taught my wife a very simple pourover technique to add to her heated milk. Since it isn't concentrated enough for her, yesterday I took the Aeropress home and showed her how to make an Aeropress "espresso," but forgot and left most equipment home. So today at work I have a grinder, kettle and V60 decanter, but only Kalita filters. What to do? Drink the swill from the bean-to-cup machine? Gross. What to do? Try a French press technique in the decanter without the benefit of the plunger, akin to James Hoffmann's method? Instead I just tried making a kind of 4/6 method using the Kalita filter instead of a V60 filter.

It was bad. Quite drinkable, but a botched extraction for sure. The filter is too thick and designed for a flat bottom. Maybe later today I'll try the French press method.

What do you like to do in a pinch? Stories!

P.S. - For any not familiar with the phrase in the title:
https://english.stackexchange.com/quest ... his/331149

#2: Post by **jpender** » August 31st, 2021, 5:16 am

I took coarsely ground and vacuum sealed doses on a backpacking trip recently and made cowboy coffee. I was quite pleased with the results. And the aroma in the bear canister each time I cut open a three day package of the coffee was just incredible. The downsides were the time (7-8 minutes to brew, settle, decant, and drain) and the cleanup: scraping out the grounds and rinsing out the pot. So even though the taste wasn't nearly as good I was happy after the first week to switch to the simplicity of instant VIA for the remainder of my trip.

Back home I experimented with home made tea bags of coffee but the extraction was poor.

#3: Post by **DamianWarS** » August 31st, 2021, 9:23 am

millmountain wrote:Ever since coffee prep began to be a kind of hobby to me, with all the usual inordinate amount of thought poured into the various apparatus, I have often wondered about scenarios in which most of that equipment is not available. Maybe not at the level of beans, hammer, stream and fire---Camping and forgot the coffee gear? Zombie apocalypse in Columbia?---but just having a grinder and kettle, maybe even a filter to hand. Cowboy coffee, basically.

Since the espresso machine is in the shop, I taught my wife a very simple pourover technique to add to her heated milk. Since it isn't concentrated enough for her, yesterday I took the Aeropress home and showed her how to make an Aeropress "espresso," but forgot and left most equipment home. So today at work I have a grinder, kettle and V60 decanter, but only Kalita filters. What to do? Drink the swill from the bean-to-cup machine? Gross. What to do? Try a French press technique in the decanter without the benefit of the plunger, akin to James Hoffmann's method? Instead I just tried making a kind of 4/6 method using the Kalita filter instead of a V60 filter.

image

It was bad. Quite drinkable, but a botched extraction for sure. The filter is too thick and designed for a flat bottom. Maybe later today I'll try the French press method.

What do you like to do in a pinch? Stories!

P.S. - For any not familiar with the phrase in the title:
https://english.stackexchange.com/quest ... his/331149

without any brewing equipment, I do jug coffee. which is as you described basically the JH method of a french press or what I like to call a "no-press" french press. but it's a simple as it gets, coffee goes into a "jug", wait 4-5 min, stir, wait until grinds sink (another 4-5 min) then decant to a carafe or cup. you can do the same straight into a cup too but the decanting part would be in your mouth but you still can get an enjoyable cup. plus immersion tends to be more forgiving than percolation especially when you mixing and matching equipment/filters. But I do not do "cowboy coffee" which is boiling the water with coffee in it, jug coffee differs in that the coffee is added after the water is heated. However, with that said, when needed, even bad coffee is still coffee.

#4: Post by **NicoNYC** » August 31st, 2021, 9:48 am

In the middle of an all-nighter in college, some classmates and I made what we called "paper towel coffee". We had pre-ground coffee and an electric kettle but no other equipment, so we fashioned a pour-over dripper out of a styrofoam cup and used some of that stiff brown industrial paper towel as a filter. While it certainly wasn't good, it did produce a bitter brown liquid that tasted reminiscent of coffee and nobody got burnt by boiling water, so I'd call it a win.

#5: Post by **Jeff** » August 31st, 2021, 10:45 am

On boiling and "cowboy coffee", depending on what plains you're drifting over, 5000' (Denver, CO, for example) boils around 203°F / 95° C, which isn't that bad of an extraction temperature. "Simmer" is somewhere between 85 and 95°C at sea level, so that's another factor.

#6: Post by **jpender** » August 31st, 2021, 10:56 am

For that matter I'm not sure that cowboy coffee requires boiling the brew. Does it? On my trip I boiled the water (at 8000-10000 feet elevation) but then turned off the heat before adding the grounds. At home I simply heated the water to around 190-195°F and then shut off the burner before adding the coffee.

This method of cowboy coffee is essentially the same as a "jug coffee", french press, or cupping. The few grounds that made it into my mouth were a very minor nuisance at worst, akin to press pot, and way easier to deal with than Turkish.

And all those tasty diterpenes too!

#7: Post by **5cylinders** » August 31st, 2021, 10:17 pm

I remember the first time I showed off my new hobby to a couple of friends, at a hotel room, with an aeropress. Time elapsed, nothing happened, because I put coffee, and hot water, into the plunger , which was left inside the chamber.
Now, I occasionally use AP's plunger as a measuring cup when traveling. The Go's plunger holds precisely 200ml water.

August 31st, 2021, 11:21 pm

The AP plunger was originally designed to hold a known quantity of water so you could put just the plunger into a microwave to heat up the brew water to the AP-preferred (low) brew temperature.

However, people used higher temperatures, and the material of the plunger gasket could degrade at high heat and so this method was dropped.

With the introduction of the Go, the gasket material went to silicone, and the plunger can again be used as a vessel to heat water in a microwave.

August 31st, 2021, 11:26 pm

I've never heated water in the AP plunger but I have poured water like a pour-over kettle. I thought at first it would be a mess to pour but it actually pours really well.