People made coffee for several hundred years before anybody invented a machine to do it, and the method they used still works. You need ground coffee, hot water and a mug.
Cowboy coffee, in a mug
- Put two tablespoons of coffee in a mug. Coarse is better if you have the choice.
- Pour hot water over it, just off the boil. Fill the mug.
- Stir once.
- Wait four minutes. The grounds will float, then most of them will sink.
- Skim the floaters off with a spoon if you like, and drink carefully, leaving the last inch behind.
That’s a real cup of coffee. It is, essentially, a French press without the press — the grounds settle instead of being pushed down. A little grit at the bottom is the whole cost.
The sinking trick
If the grounds won’t settle, add a small splash of cold water after the four minutes. It drops the temperature and the grounds go down faster. Camp cooks have done this forever and it feels like cheating.
If you have a strainer
Brew it in one mug and pour it through a fine kitchen sieve into another. If the sieve is coarse, line it with a paper towel — rinse the towel with hot water first, or your coffee will taste of paper towel. A clean handkerchief or a cheesecloth works the same way.
If you have a saucepan
Water and coffee together in the pan, bring it to just below a boil, take it off the heat, let it sit four minutes, then pour slowly. Do not let it actually boil — boiling coffee is where the burnt, scorched taste comes from, and it is the one genuine mistake available in this whole article.
What about instant?
Instant coffee is fine. Genuinely. It is not as good as fresh coffee and it does not need to be — it is a different product solving a different problem, and modern instant is far better than its reputation.
Nobody at this company will think less of you for it, partly because we are not there, and partly because the point of coffee is that you enjoy drinking it.
When you do buy something
A French press is about twenty dollars and is the easiest good brewer there is. Buy that before you buy anything with a plug on it — and buy a grinder before either, which is a hill we have been standing on since 2015.