Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Coffe #2 - OP's post reminded me...

As I think back, maybe the reason I've been so used to really strong coffee is because my father (Norwegian to the core) used an old-fashioned percolator.. Except he stripped out the guts, dumped in about a cup of grounds, 8C of water and boiled the snot out of it for about 30 minutes... When that pot was (more or less ) empty, he'd just add another cup of grounds, more water and boil THAT for another 30 mns... That, my friends, was effin' COFFEE...

He had a hired man for many years at the greenhouses.. Ole Solstad - another true-blooded Norwegian.. He would tell the story about the old days when the farms around here had 'threshing crews'.. And whatever farm they were working at, it was the wife of the farmer who had the whole crew for noon meals.. He said one farmers wife asked one of the men how he liked the coffee.. His reply was, "heh, I've had two-three swallers and ain't tasted coffee yet." Well, next day's noon meal she was waiting for him with, shall we say, a 'special pot' of coffee... It was about as thick as maple syrup and black enough to paint a Model-T.. She poured him a cup and stood waiting... I guess his reaction told her that he was never, EVER gonna complain about the coffee again...

Ole was a very good man.. I worked with him for probably 15+ years or so.. And man, did he have stories...

Camp fire coffee.

i've brewed it like that myself at scout camp when i forgot to take the guts of the pot with me. its actually pretty good. little chunky but it settles. somewhat.

It sounds like a way to make truly horrible coffee. I'll admit I've never tried boiling it for 30 minutes - much shorter periods of boiling have proved more than sufficient to ruin coffee in my own experience. There's a reason for the saying "coffee boiled is coffee spoiled" - you end up breaking down some of the components of coffee which give it its flavour and aroma, and over-extracting some compounds which make it bitter and nasty-tasting.

There again, if you like it this way then go your hardest. There's no accounting for taste.

In the cow camps down on the King Ranch, the camp cooks used to dump the contents of a 1-lb can of coffee into a fair-sized coffee pot filled with water. That went on a grate over the campfire and stayed there until it had boiled for at least 20-30 minutes. Then, it was set off to the side and a 1-lb bag of sugar was emptied into the pot and stirred in. A dipper of cold water was added to settle the grounds. Everyone filled a tin cup and sat around jawing until it was time to mount up.

The last thing that the vaqeuros did before mounting up was to go over the the water cooler. Each one filled their cup with plain water, swished it around in their mouths, and spit it out. Then, they got on their horses and rode off to to go to work!.

I don't like grounds, but the mud in the bottom of the cup is the best part.

My grandmother kept three choices of coffee, boiled, perked and a jar of instant decaf with a pot of hot water, at every meal and ready at all times for family and friends that might drop in. The decaf was mainly for one of her grown sons who, per doctors orders, had to give up full caffeinated coffee due to having a good bit of his stomach surgically removed because of bleeding ulcers.

Folks that drank her boiled coffee typically poured a little bit of it at a time out of the coffee cup into a saucer and sipped it from the saucer. At breakfast she used a little boiled coffee to make red-eye gravy.

.. Well, I might have exaggerated that "30 mns" a bit... But it seemed like a fair time passed before the pot was tipped...


.. Damn, that sounds good..




Dang, I forgot that....my grandfather (paternal, right from the old country) did the same thing - poured some onto the saucer and drank that.. Man, I haven't thought about that for about 60 years...