I went to the woods to drink surprisingly great espresso

As summer returns, I’m again reminded of my limits as I head into the great outdoors: I can put up with a heavy, uncomfortable backpack, bug bites, mud, and even bland dehydrated food, but I will not forsake my morning brew.

I’ve tried every imaginable coffee gadget in my half-century of camping. These range from simple drip systems when ultralight backpacking, an AeroPress when not weighing every gram, French press plungers when assisted by bicycle, and small countertop coffee makers when adventuring by van. Yet I keep returning to handheld espresso makers whenever possible for reasons of taste, convenience, and — let’s face it — gadget appeal. These portable, thermos-sized machines offer a decent approximation of a real, pulled espresso when there’s no barista for miles.

There are two ways to go here. The cheapest, fastest, and easiest-to-clean models are built around Nespresso coffee capsules — you pour cold water in, press a button, and voila, liquid gold. More expensive models use ground coffee and target people who argue over things like blade versus burr grinders. Or you can get the best of both worlds with a hybrid machine that works with both coffee grounds and capsules. It doesn’t really matter which logo you buy because they all seem to share a common factory somewhere in China. Cera+ and OutIn are popular brands, but you’ll probably also be fine picking from the dozens of cheaper, alphabet-soup names found on Amazon.

I recently tested the Ikape Kapo K2 Pro (58mm) portable espresso machine from Cera+. It’s listed for $239 but is sold on Amazon for $200. It only works with ground coffee, but it allows you to dial in your preferred taste through granular controls over temperature, flow speed, and the length of time you want the grounds to pre-soak, stand, and extract. It features a powerful 20-bar pump and a 13,500mAh battery that recharges over USB-C. In my testing, it’s good for about five 18-to-20-gram extractions when starting with cold water. You’ll get many more if you preheat the water or use less of it. Each extraction takes about three minutes, give or take, depending upon how much water you add to the 80ml (2.7oz) reservoir.

In a blind taste test against a friend’s expensive La Marzocco espresso machine, the Ikape performed surprisingly well. Two of us plebes couldn’t taste any difference, but the owner of the fancy machine confidently could, citing a more sour and less full-bodied result from the Ikape. Mind you, we’re talking $199 versus $5,000, and even he had to admit that the handmade Italian machine didn’t produce an espresso that was 25 times better!

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

If, like me, you enjoy coffee but don’t obsess over it, then the cleanup and fiddliness of the Ikape just isn’t worth it when traveling. The Ikape is for anyone that enjoys the slow anticipation of a really 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 those no-named, handheld “espresso makers” that work with Nespresso-compatible capsules — especially when generic machines can be had for around $50. And if you pay a few cents more for official capsules, Nespresso makes it relatively painless to collect and responsibly return all those tiny aluminum pods for recycling.

Thoreau urged us to “simplify, simplify.” And really, what better way to twist that message into support for your addiction than by dropping a tiny coffee pod into a battery-powered thermos and letting modern engineering do the rest? You can still venture into the unknown and suck out all the marrow of life this summer; just make sure you’re properly caffeinated while doing it.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / noti.group