We love good coffee. A lot. We don’t, however, like bad coffee. At all.

So our travel coffee plan was one of our most important packing considerations. The setup needed to be small (we travel with 40L carry-on packs). It had to require hot water only (we aren’t guaranteed a stove everywhere we go). It had to be simple (finding replacement filters isn’t always possible). And it had to be sturdy (breakable glass while backpacking is a bad idea).

Additionally, and perhaps this goes without saying, the setup needed to support grinding beans daily. While Starbucks Via instant coffee definitely comes through in a pinch (and we carried it with us for such moments), traveling for a year and drinking pre-ground or instant coffee wasn’t an option for us. We like coffee beans roasted no more than a few weeks prior and ground immediately before preparation.

Taking all these requirements into consideration, we settled on a 20 fl oz GSI Outdoors polypropylene french press with nested mug and a Hario Coffee Mill Mini Slim Ceramic hand grinder (which you can see in the photos below, needed a little TLC tape-job halfway through the year).

After much experimentation we found what we believe is the smallest way to pack our setup, which I carried in my bag every stop of the way. We bought coffee beans along the way and asked our friends to bring a re-supply when they were visiting from the states. Countries like Guatemala and Colombia have incredible beans at great prices, whereas SE Asia and southern South America do not.

Below are some photos of our setup, as well as a stop-motion video of the process. If you have any questions, or your own travel coffee setup you’d like to share, please reach out!

And below is a stop-motion boomerang mashup video of the process. It became a ritual to unpack the coffee sack, assemble the pieces, hand-grind the beans, and 4 minutes later enjoy delicious coffee as if we were home.