Ep. 26: Perfect Camping Coffee | RV boondocking tips and tricks | AeroPress | Grand Adventure

Hi, welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido. Now if you're anything like we are, that cup of coffee that you brew when you first get up in the morning is one of the most important parts of the day. Now we've been searching high and low for the perfect way to brew a cup of coffee, a great cup of coffee, while we're boondocking without using any electricity whatsoever, and we think we finally found it. We're here to share it with you today on this episode of Grand Adventure, so stick around! Now our solution last camping season was to use a single K cup coffee maker. This one right here as a matter of fact. The reason we went with that was it doesn't have a hot plate, so it would use a lot less of our battery's power, while on the inverter converting that to 110 AC, it wouldn't burn as much battery because it doesn't have the hot plate. It still burns a lot of battery to be honest with you. It was kind of disappointing. Now we could also go with a French press coffee maker. The problem with that, it's a mess to clean up. You get that slurry, that sludge going on in the bottom of the French press after you've brewed your coffee, and it would require a lot of water and a lot of paper towel to clean up that mess. So we found a better solution. Now this is the AeroPress coffee maker by a company called Arobe. You know, the guys who make that kind of frisbee ring thing. However, it works in a very similar way to a French press, but there are some very, very important distinctions. Now when not in use, this is literally the whole thing. A French press works by brewing by immersion. You take the grounds, matter of fact you use a coarser ground than you normally would to try and keep the stuff from going through the screen, and you let the water in the coffee mixture steep for a good five minutes to bring out the flavor in the coffee, but it's done simply by immersing the coffee in the hot water. This works differently. This works under both heat and pressure. Now you know an espresso machine works under pressure making espresso or cappuccino. This works in a very similar way to that. It uses pressure and heat to extract the flavor from the ground coffee. Now the other important distinction from a French press, a French press uses that screen that you press down against the coffee to hold the coffee grounds down there. This actually uses these little disc paper filters, and when you're all done these filters make an important difference in how easy it is to clean up after brewing with the AeroPress. I'll show you. Now while I'm heating up some water on the stove, I'm going to grind some beans because that always makes the best cup of coffee. This is actually a fully manual coffee grinder, which like the AeroPress doesn't use any electricity whatsoever. I'm going to take about 17 grams of beans, put them in there, just grab the lid, put the crank on the coffee maker, and I'm going to start grinding that coffee. This is a process that takes about five minutes or so. It's not quick. Obviously you can shortcut this by using ground coffee, but I prefer fresh ground. You're going to grind it for the AeroPress somewhere between a drip and an espresso, so kind of a fine grind. I'm going to come back in a few minutes. I'm going to save you watching me do this for five minutes, and we'll come back when this is all done. Okay, now that our beans are all ground, get this ready for brewing the coffee. This is actually the filter holder. I'm going to grab one of these little paper filters. All they are is a little disc. They come in packs of 350. I accidentally grabbed two, and all you do is lay that in the bottom and screw that back on. Put that part of the AeroPress on top of the cup. Now we're going to take our coffee, pour it into the AeroPress, and I'm going to take the water that I've had on the stove. You want it a little under boiling, about 190 degrees. Fill it right up to where that number four is on the AeroPress. We're going to stir it. They actually give you a little wand to do so with the AeroPress. Stir it just quickly. Make sure that it's all mixed rather well. We're going to put the plunger part of the AeroPress, and you can see it's got a seal, and that's critical. Put that right on top, and we're going to let that sit for about 45 to 60 seconds. Be right back. Okay, it's been about a minute, and literally all I have to do is press this down, which may seem like a French press, but it's actually using pressure because that's a sealed chamber to force the coffee through that filter. Eventually you're going to get to the point, see it's going down, but it's nowhere near the plunger. You're eventually going to get to the point where you hear the air coming out, and that's all there is to it. Let's set this coffee aside for just a moment, and I'm going to show you about the cleanup. Now this is kind of the beauty of the whole thing. To clean it up all you do is remove that, force this the rest of the way, and out pops that little cake of coffee. A little bit of residue on the rubber seal might just give that a quick rinse, but that's all there is to cleaning this device up. Honestly, I don't care how I've brewed cups of coffee in the past, and I've used just about every method. Despite the fact that this uses no electricity, this is truly one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had. We hope that this has been useful to you. If you'd like an AeroPress of your own, I'll put Amazon links down below for both the AeroPress and the manual coffee grinder. Understand that we haven't been compensated by any way in any shape or form for making this video, or even encouraged by anybody. We just found this is a great solution for making coffee while we're boondocking, and we wanted to share it with you. Those Amazon links, in the interest of full disclosure, we do receive a small commission from Amazon. It doesn't change the price that you pay for it, but the channel does receive a small commission payment that we can use into making future videos. If you found this information useful, please give us a thumbs up down below. We're online on the web, also at grandadventure.tv. We hope that you'll share these videos with your friends and family who also like to go camping, and if you haven't already done so, please think about becoming one of our Grand Adventurers. Subscribe, it doesn't cost you anything. Subscribe to us on YouTube, you can do so right here on the screen where you see our logo. Thank you very much for coming along, and until next time please remember, life is nothing but a Grand Adventure! We'll see you soon!