My Coffee Travel Kit
In my lifetime, while it's never been hard to simply get a cup of coffee, finding a very good cup hasn't always been as easy as it is now.
Before the days of smartphones, I knew where to get the best coffee in my hometown, but whenever I travelled, I had to use word-of-mouth to find a good cup and found my idea of a good cup often differed from others'.
Second Cup would do in a pinch. I never cared for their drip coffee, but their overpriced sugary lattes were pretty decent back in the day.
Once Tim Horton's dominated the coffee landscape in Canada, that became people's de facto answer to where to get coffee. That persists to this day, sadly. I never liked it. Bigger cities had Starbucks, which was about as good as I could expect, but I've never really liked it. There's a whole world outside of roasting coffee to the blackest black.
So, years ago, I started doing something kind of absurd, but also kind of necessary for a coffee nerd: I made a travel coffee kit.
It consists of:
- a faux canvas bag with a zipper, which holds everything but the kettle
- a bag of coffee beans
- a Porlex mini hand grinder
- an AeroPress
- a kettle
If I stay in a hotel, I typically buy bottled water for brewing.
It's silly, but it has been very satisfying to make good, fresh coffee while on-the-go.
It's easier to find good coffee shops nowadays, so I don't always pack all this, but if I'm going to be out of town in an Airbnb for a few days, you bet it's coming with me.
Now that good coffee is easier to find, I try to find a local roaster wherever I go, picking up beans to take home from Montreal, Halifax, Chicago, and even Onomichi, Japan. ☕
