Road Trip 2012: Aeropress Morning And A Smoky Home

In May 2012, my mother-in-law gave us her old car – but we live in Halifax and the car was in Edmonton. So we flew there and drove it all the way back to Halifax. We had great weather and I had a new camera. This is the last part of a series of blog posts about the trip.

(All of the photos are hosted on Flickr – click on any to see bigger versions and browse the full set.)

After several weeks and several thousand kilometres, we were ready to get back home to Halifax. Our campsite in New Brunswick was only a few hours’ drive away.

But first I needed coffee.

All through this trip, I had been trying to find the best way to have decent coffee while camping – little Nescafé packets with pre-mixed sugar and milk powder were nifty but not exactly gourmet. I had picked up some nice Italian Illy coffee in Alberta and had used it in a little coffee filter cone over a cup – but I could only pour a little bit of water at a time, and it was difficult to clean properly. I finally found the best solution for camping coffee – or for any coffee, for that matter: Aeropress.

I had been hearing coffee snobs raving about Aeropress, and I liked how simple and elegant it seemed to be. While in Toronto, Shannon had found one for me in the St. Lawrence Market, and this morning was my first opportunity to try it out:

We had been camping for years, but had mostly tried cooking on a campfire, which was fun, but time-consuming and messy and smoky. Our whole experience improved once we started using little alcohol-based camp stoves. They’re portable, clean, and easy to set up – and they can boil a pot of water quite quickly.

The Aeropress is an unbelievably simple device – it’s essentially a human-powered espresso press. Here are all of the parts: