I have been experimenting with my esbit stove ( maybe not geniouine esbit, but anyways). I made some Cup-A-Soup. and some coffee. I tested one tab of fuel, 2 tabs, and then 3 tabs all together.

I noticed that 3 tabs was overkill . The flame was like ( too much fuel and little oxygen). It made my pot blackish. Two brought the pot to a rolling boil, and one tab didn't. However, I wondered : why do we need water to boil. In any case we will have to wauit for it to cool a bit before drinking it. So, I am planning to use one tab only even if water won't boil completely. It only needs to boil if you are sterilizing water or cooking something. IN other cases, you need temp to go up and hover below boiling for a few minutes.

My soup was a mix of lentil soup , French onion, vegetable, and mushroom. About one spoon each , then added water, stirred, and covered for 10-15 minutes. It was tasty and rich enough for a lunch.

The next time I am only using one tab of fuel.

About coal briquettes in the esbit stove, well, their heat was minimal and only useful to keep water from cooling down. I am thinking to ditch the coal briquettes and carry more esbit tabs next time.

My problem is ... I only have a finite stock of these tabs. That is why I tried to stretch them with coal briquettes in the first place. However, the good news is that I had some real old fuel tabs (became yellowish) but they still burnt cleanly. This means they can be stored for many years ( in our HOT environment). This is encouraging.

True, it doesn't have to boil but how else will you make that nice cup of tea (without which civilization as we know it would be impossible)?

Actually, milk is pasteurized by heating to 165F (and held for five minutes or so, I believe). Checking instructions for cooking our holiday turkey, we were told to see that the meat thermometer read 165 F to insure that all the Bad Guys were knocked off. I think I see a trend developing here...

Anyway, if we were out in the woods and couldn't bring the water to a rolling boil, I would get it as hot as possible, perhaps let it sit a bit, and drink up. Dehydration is deadly and giardia isn't.

i once had to boil water from a mountain stream on a hot day when I definitely didn't want tea. I boiled the water, put it in my water bottle, placed the water bottle in the nice babbling brook, and set the next batch to boiling. By the time batch #2 was ready (about 4 minutes), batch #1 was sufficiently cool. I hopped on my bike. Proceeding about a mile, I came upon a clean water source.....

Tea??? I think you mean coffee. Coffee is a survival essential, at least for some of us. Without coffee we would be faced with TEOTWAKI

You can't drink boiling water anyway so heating it to boiling to make tea or coffee seems like a little overkill.

But that temperature is held for a longer period of time is it not?

I hope you didn't let the neck of the bottle get wet from the babbling brook.

Not to derail the thread to something else but ...



Off course, hikermor was not in a survival situation, and needed water to cool quickly, but imagine if someone was cold and wet.

A guy did the same in a survival show or video where the scenario is that he has been wet and cold. I immediately thought that the situation dictates he should utilize every ounce of heat and not waste it away. He should have hugged that hot bottle and absorbed the excess heat in his body or wet clothes instead of wasting it in the running stream..

In another video, the guy starts the esbit stove by a match, then he blows the match and tosses it aside. Although the heat in the remaining match isn't much, but we should re-program ourselves to conserve every BTU or calorie in a survival situation, so he should have tossed the match INTO the esbit stove.

Here is the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dju4AOVV1cA

At 8:20, the guy puts his bottle in the stream.

But I like what he did at 10:30.
He positioned his wet clothes around the fire so that most of the heat ( in any direction ) is utilized in drying his clothes.

I mentioned the "babbling brook episode" because one of the complaints about boiling water is the length of time it takes for the water to cool down. Much more typically I have been in cooler to very cold situations where the hot water is transformed to tea (or coffee, if you prefer) and consumed promptly, the better to warm the Inner Man. Actually, I was once in a situation where we had a thermos of hot water and somehow no tea bags, not even coffee grounds. So we drank hot water straight. On a cool, breezy day, it was surprisingly good, and we utilized the heat it contained.

I suspect that in most remote backcountry situations where you are in the upper reaches of a drainage, the water is pretty much OK without any treatment. I much prefer to do something to be sure the water doesn't contain any nasties, but I have imbibed plenty of raw water, a few from rather dubious sources and as far as I know, I have never been sick

I have a friend at work who was told by doctors to reduce his intake of tea and coffee. He joins us sometimes and takes hot water only. I tried it once or twice and it was OK.

When I look at the process of boiling water and then waiting for it to cool down, I see it as a energey wasting habit like some drivers who see red light, keep their foot on the gas, and then when they reach the traffic light, only then they press the brakes. Very wasteful way of driving. I usually coast a bit before reaching the light . Simialrly when I - occasionally - iron my own clothes , I unplug the iron from the outlet one or two minutes before finishing and utilize the remaining heat in the iron for the last touches.

I hate to waste material and energy, and believe we should develop habits of conservation , which can be useful in bad times.

Up to recently, I would have said a hearty amen. However, about 2 weeks ago now I decided to completely cut out caffeine out of my diet and switched over to naturally caffeine free herbal teas. I gotta say, I feel more alert & awake throughout the day than I did before (on a typical work day I'd have at least 4 or 5 cups of coffee).

Whether or not I make this a permanent change, it sure has reshaped my understanding of my "need" for coffee.

Poor Denis, poor, poor misunderstood Denis.
When I was in school in Houston in the mid-eighties
I was given the nickname "Bucket" cause my classmates swore that's how much coffee I drank every day. Now I'm down to only a quart.

Co-worker once had this huge coffee cup. So one day I took a garage door handle and bolted it to a 5 gallon bucket and sat it on his desk.

Place a small piece of tin foil around the bottom of your cup or pot. Keeps the sticky mess on the foil and you can just toss it at the end of the day. Saves a heck of a lot of scrubbing.

I understand you don't really need to to boil for several minutes. Once you get the water to boiling temp you actually have killed off most of the organisms. A rolling boil for several minutes is overkill but still promoted by a lot of people to be "extra" safe.

I hear you ... its not something I would have contemplated up until recently. Like you, my love & consumption of coffee is a small part of my identity, its something people know me for. Heck, this is the pen that rides in my work notebook:



It's just that I've started slowly working towards healthier eating (not portion control, but trying to base what I eat more on natural, nutritious foods) and as a part of this I kept running into the recommendation to kick the caffeine. I figured since overall health & vitality, not sentimentality, was my goal that I'd give it a shot. So far it's been a positive experience.

I gave up coffee a few months ago too. I was following the 5:2 reduced calorie diet, which having only 600kcal on two non-consecutive days a week. I like coffee with milk and sugar, which was too many calories, so I was going without two days a week. I found that gave me headaches from caffeine withdrawal. Knowing I was affected to that extent bothered me enough to drop coffee altogether.

As it happens, I didn't miss it; I guess I don't have an addictive personality. However, I still haven't found anything great to replace it with. I mention it here because I sometimes make low-cal fruit squash with boiling water. I find this has more flavour than herbal teas.