Best Backpacking Coffee 2025 Complete Ultralight System
Last Updated: March 6, 2025
By Alan Dixon
By Jaeger Shaw
Everything You Need To Make World-Class Backpacking Coffee
Ditch that acrid Starbucks Via. You deserve better. The best backpacking coffee is pour over! With just three ounces of inexpensive brewing equipment that you wouldn’t otherwise carry, you can wake up every morning to a cup of joe that meets strict SCA Golden Cup standards. From pots and mugs to drippers and filters, this guide overviews our complete system, item-by-item, and how to use it to make the best backpacking coffee possible.
Jump ahead for pro tips on brewing. And while you’re here, don’t miss corresponding buyer’s guides to pour over drippers, heat exchanger pots, backpacking stoves, and titanium mugs.
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The Complete Backpacking Coffee System
- Dripper: Zebrang V60 Flat Dripper
- Coffee Filter: Hario V60 #2
- Mug: Snow Peak Ti-Double H450 Stacking
- Mug Lid: Klean Kanteen Tumbler Lid
- Pot: Firemaple Petrel G2 w/ Sleeve
- Stove: MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe
- Grounds Storage: Reusable Mylar Bags
- Spoon: TOAKS Titanium Long Handle
- At-Home Digital Scale: Maestri House Mini Rechargeable
- At-Home Burr Grinder: Baratza Encore
- Preferred Coffee Beans: Sey Coffee Light Roast. Klatch Coffee Medium-Light
Price, Weight, Reason Table
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| Category | Make/Model | Cost ($) | Carried Weight (oz) | Reason |
| Dripper | Zebrang V60 Flat | 24 | 2.4 |
Lightweight, collapsible, brews world-class coffee
|
| Paper Filter | Hario V60 #2 Paper | 15 | .04 |
Best filter, doesn’t burst, list weight for 1 filter
|
| Mug | Snow Peak H450 | 60 | 3.5 |
Lightweight, insulated, durable, no handle preferred
|
| Mug Lid | Klean Kanteen Tumbler | 8 | 0.7 |
Keeps warm, prevents big spills, best aftermarket lid
|
| Pot | Firemaple Petrel G2 | 33 | 7.2 |
Heat exchanger, pour spout, neoprene sleeve
|
| Stove | MSR PRD | 85 | 2.9 |
Fast, wind-resistant, pressure regulated, arms fit HX slots
|
| Coffee Storage | Resealable Mylar Bag | 20 | 0.3 |
For storing grounds. 6×9 size is best, 5×8 for short trips
|
| Spoon | TOAKS Ti Long | 13 | 0.7 |
Elongated for scooping coffee out of mylar bags.
|
| Coffee Grounds | Klatch Coffee, Sey Coffee | 1.5 | 0.8 | Per 12 ounce serving of coffee. Price approximated. |
| Digital Scale | Maestri House Digital | 30 | 0.0 | For measuring coffee beans at home. Accurate to .1g |
| Burr Grinder | Baratza Encore | 150 | 0.0 |
SCA-award winner, grind beans at home day before trip
|
Zebrang V60 Flat Pour Over Dripper
Zebrang V60 Flat is the best pour over dripper for backpacking coffee because it is lightweight, collapsible, durable, intuitive to use, and brewed coffee perfectly to SCA Golden Cup standards in our testing. The conical shape matches our preferred burst-resistant Hario V60 #2 filters, and its ribbed silicone body holds heat well during brewing. The fact that it makes top notch coffee is no surprise, since it’s functionally identical to the 5x World Brewers Cup Championship winning Hario V60 #2 Dripper (Zebrang is an outdoor-focused subsidiary of Hario). Fold in half and lay flat for in-pack storage. Make sure to align the snaps with the holder and the unit will securely stay together as one.
- Price: $24
- Carried Weight: 2.4 oz
- Reason Chosen: Lightweight, collapsible, brews world-class coffee
Hario V60 #2 Paper Filters
Hario V60 #2 is the SCA Golden Cup preferred paper filter for all conical drippers, and works perfectly with the aforementioned Zebrang V60. From a connoisseurial perspective, paper filters brew far superior coffee compared to reusable metal/cloth alternatives. And for backcountry purposes, they’re weightless and burst-proof, meaning you squeeze any remaining liquid out of the grounds before disposing in your carry out bag and composting at home – perfectly LNT compatible, no rinsing required.
- Price: $11 (per 100 pack)
- Carried Weight: .04 oz per filter
- Reason Chosen: Best filter, doesn’t burst when squeezing liquid out of grounds. LNT-friendly.
Snow Peak Ti-Double H450 Insulated Mug
For the ultimate drinking experience, choose a Snow Peak Ti-Double H450 ml mug. These elegant, double-walled titanium Japanese vessels are lightweight, durable, beautifully made, and help keep the system insulated for optimal extraction while brewing. The lack of a fold out handle is highly desirable because holding the sidewalls has a pleasant warming effect on colds hands without burning them, and because handles add weight, failure potential, and are prone to snagging on other gear. We recommend a 450ml (15 oz) mug over smaller sizes, because the bottom of the Hario filter protrudes an inch below the Zebrang dripper, making a bit of extra volume highly desirable.
- Price: $60
- Carried Weight: 3.5 oz
- Reason Chosen: Lightweight, insulated, durable, no handle preferred
Klean Kanteen Tumbler Lid
Sealing off the top of your mug with a lightweight sip-lid will keep your perfectly brewed coffee warmer for longer. This prevents the race against time to drink your coffee before it golds, and will help you to derive more joy in the backcountry. This Klean Kanteen Tumbler Lid works perfectly with the aforementioned Snow Peak H450, and is lighter weight and overall superior to Snow Peak’s own version (also sold seperately).
- Price: $8
- Carried Weight: 0.7 oz
- Reason Chosen: Keeps warm, prevents big spills, better than Snow Peak version
Firemaple Petrel G2 Pot
Heat Exchanger pots are the fastest and most fuel efficient vessel in which to heat water in the backcountry, and one half of the SuperStove System. They feature a corrugated base ring which captures and transfers to the water additional heat that would otherwise drift off or blow away. From a coffee brewing perspective, we like the Firemaple Petrel G2 because it has a spout for more accurate pour over brewing, and a neoprene sleeve to help keep your water hot once boiled. However, one minor downside to the Petrel series is that the pin-ends of the handle hinges are unacceptably sharp, and we recommend filing them down.
- Price: $33
- Carried Weight: 7.2 oz
- Reason Chosen: Heat exchanger, pour spout, neoprene sleeve
MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe
MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe is one half of the SuperStove System, and one of the two most effective backcountry burners on the market. What makes it special is the combination of high BTU output for fast boil speed, good fuel economy, wind-resistance via a cupped head, and pressure regulation for improved performance in cold and with near-empty canisters. The other best stove is Soto Windmaster Triflex, but we have chosen this one because the arms interface better with Petrel G2.
- Price: $85
- Carried Weight: 2.9 oz
- Reason Chosen: One of two best burners, arms fit Petrel G2 better than Windmaster Triflex
Smell-Resistant Resealable Mylar Bags
For storing coffee grounds, we recommend these ultralight, waterproof, smell-resistant, resealable mylar bags. They will preserve the flavor profile of your coffee and prevent it from going stale, all without imparting odor onto the rest of your food bag. They come in multiple sizes, 6×9″ is the best overall, but you can get away with 5×8″ for shorter trips. You will bring at least two bags, one for fresh grounds and one for used. Because the used filters will add bulk and the grounds expand when wet, we recommend accounting for extra space in the garbage bag, relative to the volume of grounds in the fresh bag.
- Price: $20 per 100 pack
- Carried Weight: 0.3 oz
- Reason Chosen: Keeps grounds fresh, smell proof, waterproof
TOAKS Titanium Long Handle Spoon
A titanium long handle spoon like this one from TOAKS should already be your default backpacking utensil, as it’s the lightest and most effective tool for eating our of freeze dried meal bags and narrow pots. But it’s also great for scooping grounds out of the aforementioned and 8-9″ deep mylar bags. A fully heaped scoop of coffee is about 7-8 grams, and three of them are perfect for a 12 ounce serving of pour over.
- Price: $13
- Carried Weight: 0.7 oz
- Reason Chosen: Ultralight and sturdy. Long handle helps reach into deep mylar bags.
Maestri House Digital Coffee Scale
A digital scale is necessary for optimal at-home brewing, and helps backpackers measure out multiple days worth of coffee grounds during trip prep. This scale from Maestri House is perfect for so many reasons. First and foremost, it’s hyper accurate. During at-home pour over, it’s literally able to detect the moment a drip of coffee is suspended in mid air, decreasing the measured weight of your brew by .1g for a split second. What’s more, it’s great looking, doesn’t take up much counter space, and is powered by a rechargeable battery that does not require plugging in during use. It also includes a timer.
- Price: $32
- Carried Weight: 0 oz (stays at home)
- Reason Chosen: Accurate to within .1g. Timer. Looks good on counter. No plug required.
Baratza Encore Burr Grinder
The Baratza makes SCA-award-winning grinders, and is the preferred option of world class brewers. It is user-friendly, reasonably compact for home counter top usage, and has 40 grind settings. While fineness of grind for pour over is a hotly debated topic in the world of coffee connoisseurs, we recommend setting this unit into the 13-16 range. Basically you want the finest grind you can get away with.
- Price: $150
- Carried Weight: 0 oz (stays at home)
- Reason Chosen: SCA-award-winning grinder
Sey Coffee
Sey Coffee out of Brooklyn, NY is a subscription based delivery service guaranteeing freshly roasted beans according to your preferences.
- Price: $24 per 250g bag
- Carried Weight: .85 oz (per 12 oz cup of coffee)
- Reason Chosen: Our favorite.
Klatch Coffee
Klatch Coffee brews in SoCal, and their delicious beans are readily available for online orders. Many have a Monday roast ensuring that they reach you at peak freshness and flavor!
- Price: $20 g per 310g bag
- Carried Weight: .85 oz (per 12 oz cup of coffee)
- Reason Chosen: Our favorite.
Disassembled Zebrang V60 Dripper, titanium spoon, mylar bag
Zebrang V60 Dripper locked in and ready to brew
How To Use This System to Make The Best Backpacking Coffee Possible
Step 1: Buy good beans & quantify your coffee needs
Making the best backpacking coffee starts with proper packing and planning. First buy fresh, high-quality coffee beans. Good beans = good coffee — there is no substitute. Next determine how much coffee you will drink while in the backcountry, factoring number of servings and volume of serving size. We subscribe to the 15:1 ratio – 15g of water for 1g of ground coffee. For a 350g (~12 oz) cup of coffee, you’ll want 23g (~.8oz) of grounds. It helps to have a digital coffee scale.
Step 2: Grind your coffee, pack into mylar bag
Grind your coffee the day before the trip. Basically the longer you wait the better it will taste. With our preferred burr grinder, the Baratza Encore, we recommend settings in the 13-16 range. By now you should know how much grounds you need, and can fill up a resealable smell-proof mylar bag accordingly. Add in an additional bag for disposing used grounds.
Step 3: Assemble your kit and start boiling
Begin by measuring the amount of water you will use and pouring it into the pot. Assemble your dripper, and place it over your mug. Add the filter, and then the grounds. Each heaping spoonfull with a titanium long spoon is about 6g, so you’ll want four heaping scoops for a twleve ounce cup. Turn the stove on and begin boiling. With a SuperStove System, twelve ounces of water will boil in a minute. If you are using unfiltered/un-purified backcountry water, the EPA recommends holding it at a boil for one minute to fully disinfect.
Step 4: Pour over technique
This simple brewing recipe should suffice for the backcountry: Using very hot (just off boil) water make around four separate, equally timed pours in a circular motion, concentrating your pouring over the middle of your grounds — avoid pouring on the sides of the dripper.
Start your next pour when the water is nearing the top of the grounds or has drained just below the grounds. Do not pour the full amount of water all at once into the dripper! Coffee should fully drain in about 3-4 minutes.
Grind matters. If your coffee drains too quickly, use a finer grind. If it drains too slowly, use a coarser grind. You may need to experiment at home until you get it right. Many coffee suppliers, like SEY Coffee or Klatch Coffee, have more sophisticated brewing recipes if you want to learn more.
Step 5: Enjoy
Watch the sun rise and enjoy your delicious, world-class pour over coffee!
Step 6: Clean up and leave no trace
Once you’re done brewing, extract the paper filter and squeeze out any remaining liquid. We prefer the Hario V60 #2 filters because they are highly resistant to bursting open when pressured. Deposit the damp, used grounds into your resealable mylar garbage bag.
SuperStove System. MSR PRD stove + Firemaple Petrel G2
The Five Things that Matter Most To Brewing the Best Backpacking Coffee
Coffee Beans and Technique Matter Most! In our testing we were able to consistently make great coffee to SCA Gold Cup Standard with many (but not all) of the coffee drippers we tested. What mattered most for making good coffee was in order of importance:
- High Quality Coffee Beans, Correctly Roasted. Bad beans = bad coffee every time. We strongly prefer light roast, and suggest you go no darker than medium-light roast. We discourage you from choosing dark roast coffee. First, because it tastes burnt obscuring all those lovely flavors of a high quality bean. Second, dark roasts get stale much faster which matters in the backcountry.
- Properly ground with a burr grinder. Use a burr grinder at home, the day before your trip, to have consistently correct particle size and avoid dusty fines that can result in bitter, over-brewed coffee. Grind them to the correct size, aiming for whatever fineness that has your dripper draining out in 3-4 minutes. We recommend a Baratza Encore grinder, set in the 13-16 range.
- 15 to 1 Ratio: For every gram of ground coffee, use 15 ml of water. For a 350 ml cup of coffee (12 ounces), you would use 23.3g of coffee. Four heaping scoops with a titanium long spoon should approximate this.
- Proper Pour Over Technique: Using very hot (just off boil) water make around four separate, timed pours in a circular motion, concentrating your pouring over the middle of your grounds — avoid pouring on the sides of the dripper. Do not pour the full amount of water all at once into the dripper!
- Keep Things Hot: Coffee extracts the best, and tastes best, when brewed at near boiling temperatures (and most folks are not fond of a lukewarm cup). Keeping brewing temps hot is a challenge as many backcountry mornings are cold and things cool quickly. There are a number of ways to solve for this. If you’re expecting cold weather, avoid collapsible drippers without full sidewalls (ex Soto Helix). Use a pot with a neoprene sleeve. Bring your water back up to boil in between the second and third pour.
Snow Peak 450ml titanium double wall mug. Klean Kanteen Lid.
Backpacking Coffee Styles: Pour Over vs Aeropress, Instant Coffee, Cowboy Coffee, French Press
vs Aeropress
There’s no denying that Aeropress brews delicious coffee. But is it better than pour over? We don’t think so, and neither do a majority of world class brewers. But even if you do subscribe to Aeropress > pour over, there’s no denying that it’s functionally inferior from a backpacking coffee maker perpsective. The unit weighs 4-5x more than our preferred dripper, and is significantly bulkier when stowed. As such pour over is the clear winner.
vs Instant Coffee
Yes, we know instant coffee is faster and lighter, and that pour over is functionally sub-optimal in that regard. We’re also aware that there have been massive improvements to quality since the advent of Starbucks Via. Check out Alpine Start for example. That being said, pour over brews world class coffee according to SCA Golden Cup standards, while instant coffee is mediocre at best, and usually quite awful. Despite the fact that instant coffee is more “functional,” we’d argue that pour over’s quality is so much higher that it ultimately yields a superior taste-to-functionality ratio.
vs French Press
French press is capable of making great coffee and has a unique taste since it retains more coffee oils, we just happen to prefer pour over. And like pour over, the equipment needed to make it, (like these Jetboil French Press plungers) is lightweight and packable — but dedicated press pots are bulky and heavy. However! Cleaning up after French press is a nightmare. The grounds are not easily contained in a filter and must be scooped out. Then the pot must be rinsed, inevitably depositing acidic grounds into a natural environment where they are unwelcome and running afoul of LNT best practices. And the coffee oils left in the pot (hard to remove) tend to flavor water and food in your pot for a while. Just sniff your pot after brewing a french press.
vs Cowboy Coffee
We’re surprised some campers still make cowboy coffee — you just don’t need to settle for getting grounds in your mouth. While you can pour cowboy coffee through a tea strainer to catch most of the grounds you still have a bunch of gritty fines that continue to brew and extract for some time after brewing This is generally not a good thing. All that said, cowboy coffee does have some merits for folks that like super strong, oily coffee and don’t mind fine grit — but it’s not going to win any brewing competitions.
Used grounds, squeezed out, placed into a resealable 5×8″ mylar bag. This size bag stores four cups worth of used grounds.
More Backpacking Coffee Pro Tips
Applying the SCA Golden Cup Standard
This is a brewing technique that results in an SCA Golden Cup. Our target is a cup with 1.45% TDS, 20+% extraction and a final in-cup temperature of at least 160F (70C). Bad technique = bad coffee every time! [Note: many coffee specialty shops have some excellent brewing recipes for a starting point.] We hold our pour over drippers to the highest possible standard, and will recommend nothing less than that which is capable of brewing an SCA Golden Cup.
What about long trips without resupply?
Depending on the length of your trip, it may not be advisable to use a backpacking pour over coffee system. This is because grounds are acidic and smelly, and should not be buried or disposed of in nature. To practice proper LNT, you must carry them out, which slowly increase the weight of your pack. Somewhere in the 5-7 day range, or on super high mileage, push-your-boundaries trips, is when instant coffee starts to become more appealing.
Dealing with Bad Tasting Water
If you expect to encounter bad tasting water and don’t want it to mess up your perfectly brewed backpacking coffee, we recommend carrying a Katadyn BeFree AC water filter. In addition to its standard hollow fiber filter, it includes a bonus activated carbon filter which removes the taste of tannins, sulfur, and even the taint of TPU plastic. Simply put, bad tasting water = bad coffee.
Cream For Your Coffee?
For those who prefer cream in their coffee, we recommend powdered heavy cream. It’s highly packable, calorically dense, and can easily be added to other meals to increase flavor and richness. We recommend it very highly, even if you don’t use it for coffee.
Pour Over At Home
Ditch that old drip brewer – everything about the best backpacking coffee system can be used to make SCA Golden Cup award-winning pour over at home too. However, for simplicity and elegance, we recommend swapping out the Zebrang Flat Dripper for a Hario V60 #2 Ceramic dripper, and adding the Fellow Stagg EKG Gooseneck Electric Kettle, and Maestri House Rechargeable Espresso Scale with timer.
A refractometer device used to test for extraction levels
Conclusion: Best Backpacking Coffee
We reiterate – pour over makes the best coffee; pour over equipment is inexpensive and ultralight; therefor pour over makes the best backpacking coffee. It tastes infinitely better than instant coffee, is tastier and less messy than French press, and is much lighter and more packable than Aeropress. With a fully optimized kit, brewing world-class backpacking coffee is a breeze, and we highly recommend you try it out. Cheers!
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