I went into the woods to drink a surprisingly good espresso

With the return of summer, I’m once again reminded of my limits when I head outdoors: I can tolerate a heavy, uncomfortable backpack, bug bites, mud, and even bland dried food, but I won’t give up my morning beverage.

I’ve tried every coffee gadget imaginable in half a century of camping. These range from Simple drip systems When the backpack is lightweight, a Aeropress When you don’t weigh every gram, French press plungers when With the help of a bicycleand small countertop coffee makers Adventure by truck. Yet I keep going back to portable espresso machines whenever possible for reasons of taste, comfort and – let’s face it – the appeal of the tool. These portable, thermos-sized machines provide a decent approximation of real espresso when there’s no barista for miles around.

There are two ways to go here. The cheaper, faster and easier-to-clean models are designed around Nespresso coffee capsules – you pour cold water into them, press a button, and voila, liquid gold. The more expensive models use ground coffee and are aimed at people debating things like burr grinders versus blade grinders. Or you can get the best of both worlds with a hybrid machine that works with both types of coffee and Capsules. It doesn’t really matter which logo you buy because they all seem to share a common factory somewhere in China. Sera+ and outside They’re well-known brands, but you’ll probably also be good at choosing from dozens of cheap, alphabet-branded names Found on Amazon.

I recently tested Ikapi Capo K2 Pro Portable Espresso Machine (58mm). From Sira+. It’s listed at $239 but is selling out Amazon for $200. It only works with ground coffee, but allows you to control your preferred taste by precisely controlling the temperature, flow speed, and length of time you want the beans to pre-steep, stand, and extract. It features a powerful 20 bar pump and a 13,500 mAh battery that can be recharged via USB-C. In my testing, it was good for about five extractions of 18 to 20 grams when starting with cold water. You’ll get more if you preheat the water or use less. Each extraction takes about three minutes, give or take, depending on how much water you add to the 80 ml (2.7 oz) tank.

In a blind taste test against a friend’s expensive La Marzocco espresso machine, the Ikape performed surprisingly well. A couple of us commoners couldn’t taste any difference, but the owner of the fancy machine could with confidence, citing a more sour and less intense result from the Ikape. Keep in mind we’re talking $199 versus $5,000, and even he had to admit that the handcrafted Italian machine didn’t produce 25 times better espresso!

On the other hand, when testing the Ikape with store-bought ground coffee, it produced a somewhat lackluster espresso that wasn’t much better than what you get from a Nespresso capsule. To get the most out of the Ikape, you’ll need to carry a grinder, which undermines its portability.

If, like me, you enjoy coffee but don’t obsess over it, cleaning and messing around in Ikape isn’t worth it when you travel. Ikape is for anyone who enjoys the slow anticipation of a truly excellent espresso brewed in a place it has no right to be.

When the choice is between coffee or no coffee, it’s hard to beat the “good enough” brew produced by no-name portable “espresso makers” that work with Nespresso-compatible pods — especially when generic coffee machines can be obtained. About $50. And if you pay a few cents extra for the official pods, Nespresso makes it relatively easy to collect all those little aluminum pods and return them responsibly for recycling.

Thoreau urged us to “simplify, simplify.” And really, what better way to turn that message into support for your addiction than by dropping a small coffee pod into a battery-powered thermos and letting modern engineering do the rest? You can still venture into the unknown and soak up all the marrow of life this summer; Just make sure you get your caffeine intake right while doing this.

Photography by Thomas Ricker/The Verge