Kuju Coffee Pour Over

A great night's sleep is a rare thing when you’re out there in the woods. Sure, if you’re glamping or cabin camping or whatnot, it’s entirely possible to be well-rested while “roughing it,” assuming the kids allow as much, but when you’re in a sleeping bag in a tent, only the most exhausting all-day trek or hard summit push is likely to cause enough fatigue to lead to legitimately solid slumber. Add some wind or rain or snoring tent mates to the equation, and the quality of your sleep will be even further diminished.

Thus the importance – nay the necessity – of bringing plenty of coffee along with you when you camp. If you’re car camping, your coffee prep can take many different forms. French press? Pour over carafe? Electric coffee maker plugged into your generator or vehicle? All these and more are options, to be sure, but more often than not, whether you’re watching every ounce of gear weight during a climb or you can haul all the weight you want for car camping, you’ll turn to instant coffee when you camp.

Now don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of good instant coffee brands out there. I’ve made plenty of decent cups of coffee courtesy of little brown crystals stirred into a mug of piping hot water and I’ve contentedly sipped said coffee on frigid glaciers, besides high alpine lakes, during daybreak in the chilly forest, and when a bit of a boost is called for during a backwoods afternoon. And when instant coffee is your only option, it’s not a bad option at all.

But ask yourself this: given the option to stir up a cup of instant or make a fresh brew, would you ever choose instant coffee? Probably not, unless time were actually so tight that you needed to make your joe and get out the door in one minute flat.

Let’s presume, on the other hand, that you have two entire minutes at your disposal, and this is imagining yourself home in your kitchen, out there a few thousand feet below the summit, in a cozy cabin, or anywhere in between. If you have those two free minutes, some hot water, a mug, and a packet of Kuju Coffee’s Single-Serve Pour-Over Coffee, then you can make superb coffee. Like seriously excellent coffee. In fact, these clever little packets make such a good cup of coffee my wife and I have both opted to use them at home before, even with our trusty coffee maker sitting right there on the counter.

Here’s how it works: you take the little Pocket Pour-Over out of its packet, tear off the top to expose fresh-smelling (and tasting) ground coffee that’s perfectly preserved thanks to a “flushing” with inert nitrogen gas before the packets are sealed. Then you pop the pocket’s little wing-like arms put and hook them over the sides of your mug. Now all you need to do is slowly pour hot water down through the exposed grounds, exactly like you would with a reusable pour-over coffee system. 

To run through that faster, you tear open the coffee packet, hook it to your mug, and pour water through the grounds. That’s it.

The coffee comes out tasting as good as you’d get with any countertop pour-over setup, and in fact, you have even more control over its strength with Kuju’s pour-over pockets because you can leave the grounds sitting there to steep in the cup even after the initial pour-over brewing. And once your desired potency is reached, you can discard the grounds and pod warmed by the knowledge that the Kuju’s Pocket PourOvers are made in a facility that’s 100% wind powered. No, that doesn’t have any effect on the flavor, but it’s still a lovely thing to know.