The other day I woke up in a 1987 Volkswagen Westfalia camper van (our friends' charming guest house in El Rito, New Mexico), snuggled deep in a few layers of wool and seeing my breath disperse in front of my face. The temperature outside hovered around freezing. I had slept just fine (thank you wool + husband), but the getting out of bed part was another story. Why not just stay tucked in until the air around me warmed up a bit? Ultimately, common sense won out and nudged me outside the covers, where the first order of business was, of course, boiling water for my coffee.
As I usually do at home, if I’m brewing manually, I waited for the water to boil and then shut off the flame, letting the water rest a minute or so while getting the other bits in order: weighing my coffee dose (15g) and then setting my single-cup dripper atop my pre-heated HydroFlask on a zeroed-out scale. I poured in 250 grams of water, placed the lid on top to preserve heat, and waited about three minutes for all the water to drip through. I had picked up a new bag of coffee in Santa Fe a couple of days before, from a roaster called Iconik, and I was excited to taste a filter-brewed version of a blend I had tasted there in a cortado. The blend was called “Lil’ Sexy” (cute) and was their spring seasonal, a combo of beans from Colombia and Guatemala. “A swirl of sunshine, a whisper of flowers, lemongrass and berry,” read the label. I was so ready for this cup of coffee. (Side note: just for fun, I did the math on the price: $25 for 8oz (226g). At 15g per serving, that meant under $1.80 per cup. A steal.)
Sip #1: delicate fruit, very light body. Less punch than I expected for a blend containing a natural-process component. Must still be too hot, I thought. Maybe it will open up as it cools. I gave it a rest, letting the temp come down a few degrees before my next sip.
Sip #2: still vaguely fruity, but not much different from my first taste. Huh. Since it was my first cup of the day, I honestly couldn’t be bothered to dwell on it much longer, and I simply drank the rest without much more critical analysis. I did, however, casually remark to my husband that the coffee was less robust than I expected. (He had tasted the cortado, too, so he had a sensory reference point.) Then came the aha! moment (again, thanks husband!):
We’re at nearly 7000 feet above sea level.
Water boils at a lower temperature at high elevation. At home in Michigan (just 600 feet above sea level), water boils at about 212 degrees F. Here in El Rito, at 7000 feet, it boils at 198-200 F.
By the time I’d poured the water into my dripper, it had likely dropped below 195 degrees, the low end of the recommended 195-205 degree window for good flavor extraction in coffee. Cooler water is less effective at extracting solids, so my coffee tasted flat for good reason: I hadn’t gotten enough solids (flavor) into my cup. Bingo.
The next day, newly empowered with this useful information, I picked the kettle up off the burner while it was still bubbling away and poured straightaway into my dripper. While the coffee dripped, I busied myself in the camper, making the bed and tidying up, anxiously awaiting what I fully expected to be a dramatically different coffee experience than yesterday.
And it absolutely was. Full-on berry profile, deliciously round body with a satisfying weight on my tongue, sweet citrus aftertaste. Here was a cup I could savor.
The challenge of water boiling at a different temperature than I’m used to was not something I considered before embarking on a six-week cross-country road trip that would take us high into the mountains of the southwest. But already it has impacted our timing for cooking beans and rice, so of course it would impact my coffee–I just hadn’t thought about it. Now I know to add it to my list of considerations, because for a coffee person, traveling always presents a challenge. How much gear do I really want to carry around? Do I invest in a hand grinder? How will I heat water? How will I clean up the spent grounds? Some of my common contenders for coffee devices that travel fairly well are Aeropress, Clever, and the easiest of all, one of the many upgraded instant coffee options on the market (Steeped bags, Coracle, freeze-dried instant from many roasters).
Ultimately, I settled on my trusty little Swissgold dripper, a lightweight plastic device consisting of three pieces: a mostly-flat-bottomed filter cup, a nesting cup with several holes where the water drips through, and a lid for heat retention. I’ve had this little device for over twenty years, and while it’s not fancy or high-tech, it reliably produces a tasty little cup with minimal effort. It’s small, durable, and doesn’t require a paper filter. (Note: I haven’t seen these for sale anywhere for many years, though I did find a couple on eBay that look pretty similar.)
I’ve had a hand grinder in the past, but I’m pretty sure I lent it out several years ago and never got it back. I opted to leave home with a small bag of coffee already ground, enough for 1-2 weeks. Less hassle, and for how quickly I figured I’d go through it, I wasn’t that worried about losing freshness. I always like to check out local roasters when I travel anyway, so I planned to pick up a fresh bag here and there along the road.
I decided it was worth it to pack my digital scale, especially since I didn’t have to schlep my gear very far in any case. I always feel more confident brewing with a scale, where I can measure both the coffee and the water. (For those of you who trust your eyeballs and can’t be bothered with a scale, I respect that!)
Since we’d be camping occasionally, we also packed our simple tuna-can stove and a small saucepan which could be used to heat water. Sometimes we’d be with friends, most of whom would certainly have coffee brewers in their kitchen; other times we’d be in a hotel, where I could suffer (ha) through in-room coffee or simply go out to a nearby cafe.
So that’s my approach: a simple single-cup dripper, ground coffee, a scale, and a way to heat water. All this fits into a relatively small pouch along with my little thermos. Two weeks in, it’s worked pretty well for me so far. If anything, I brought too much coffee; I hadn’t finished my first bag before buying the bag in Santa Fe. I see two lessons here: 1. When brewing at high elevations, remember to use water directly off the boil; and 2. I should use up the coffee I have so that I can buy from the next great local roaster I discover.