You can’t always plug in the coffee pot or stop by a Starbucks. If you’re out camping or RVing, you may find yourself without power and miles from the nearest cafe.
Luckily, if you just can’t wake up without a cup of joe, there are still many other ways to get your caffeine fix.
1. Do it like the cowboys do—pour grounds right in the can.
Before there were K-Cups and espresso machines, cowboys made their coffee over a campfire by pouring grounds right in the pot of boiling water. You just need to heat the water, dump the grounds in, wait a little bit, and pour.
“Cowboy coffee” gets a bad rap sometimes but that’s also because it’s not often made correctly. You can learn how to make a good cup of “cowboy coffee” in more detail here.
2. Don’t hesitate—percolate.
Percolators cause boiling water to bubble up and into a basket of grounds. While they require more weight than just a simple pot, they’ve been around forever, and make coffee-making a fun experience.
3. Make a DIY coffee bag.
You can make them ahead of time and bring them wherever. And if you don’t like the coffee they serve where you’re at, you can prepackage whatever brew you’re most happy with. Learn how to make these DIY coffee brewing bags here.
4. Use instant coffee packs.
Instant coffee is the easiest way to get your caffeine fix. You can pay for the pricier, gourmet instant packets from Starbucks or get very affordable instant coffee from Folgers.
They’re lightweight to carry and easy to make in the morning. Just heat up water over your stove or over the campfire and mix in a packet.
5. Use an Aero-Press.
French presses have a filter that sits at the top of the mixture. Grounds can sometimes gum up the filter, and cause difficulty in making your coffee and cleaning the press.
The Aero-Press uses micro-filter technology to eliminate the particles. You can store coffee as a concentrate for days and cleaning is easy.
6. Pour over coffee.
Super light, and works well for taking on hiking or camping trips. The legs clip to nearly any cup or mug, and the filter bag makes ground-free coffee every time it’s used.
The coffee maker itself weighs less than half an ounce. You can get it on Amazon here.
7. Money’s not an issue? Upgrade to a fancy RV espresso machine.
Don’t like to rough it while you’re roughing it? The Jura ENA Micro 9 is the favorite of full-time RVers David and Brenda Bott, and is claimed to be the “world’s smallest one-touch automatic cappuccino machine.”
As you can expect, you’re going to have to pay up for the foamy goodness this high-grade coffee maker produces at about $1,400 on Amazon. It’s programmable, too, for both coffee strength and temperature. Yum!
