Whenever I go hunting or otherwise tromping through the boonies, one of the things I take with me is an Esbit stove and a bunch of fuel tabs. This is so that I can boil up some water to use to make meal out of some freeze drieds while I’m out hunting. I don’t drink coffee or tea, so my need for super hot water in the field is usually just limited to rehydrating something. Certainly, I can make a cup of hot beverage if I want, I’m just saying that I normally don’t.

The Esbit stove works pretty well for what it is. It’s main advantages, to me, are the compactness and portability combined with the light weight and durability of the fuel – fuel tabs about the size of a piece of bubble gum. The drawback is that these fuel tabs don’t put out as much heat as other fuel sources, but there is always a tradeoff in things. The end result is that it can take a little bit more time to boil some water than it would using other fuel sources.

The supermegawesome gadget for making hot water in the field is the JetBoil line of products. Theyre basically an isobutane cartridge, same as found on a lot of backpacking stoves, and a cooking vessel with a heat exchanger. I was always reluctant to pick one up because, up to this point, my needs had ben adequately met with the Esbit stove and I regarded the tall Jetboil vessels, about the size of a large travel mug, to be rather bulky and overkill for my needs…after all, I only need about 12-16 oz of water for a freezedried meal.

Additionally, for my ‘crisis cooking’ at home in the event of some sort of disaster I have a kerosene stove, a Coleman stove, and an Omnifuel stove that will literally burn any liquid fuel. A JetBoil would be a quadriary level of redundancy…maybe even deeper than that.

But…I was killing some time the other day and wandered into REI and saw that JetBoil had a smaller, much more compact version called the Stash. The attraction was that everything needed nested into the small-enough -to-be-handy-but-large-enough-to-be-useful cooking pot. I already carry a titanium cooking cup to use with the Esbit stove, and this stove and fuel container would easily fit inside that…so it fits within a footprint that I am already using.

Curiosity got ahold of me and I wondered how long it would take to actually bring a goodly amount of water to a rolling boil. The most water-intensive of my freezedrieds calls for 16 oz. of water. I figured I’d throw caution to the wind and poured 20 oz. into the vessel, put the lid on, cranked the flame, and started the timer. Two and a half minutes later it was boiling mightily. That’s pretty sweet. It takes significantly longer to achieve that same result with the Esbit stove.

The most obvious drawback is that this stove, and others like it, run on isobutane cartridges. The reasonable question is where do you get additional cartridges in a crisis? The same place you get gasoline, kerosene, white gas, and propane – you don’t. You either have a stash of it, or you scrounge it from somewhere. But, as I said, I already have cooking options for cooking with gasoline, kerosene, white gas, propane, and alcohol. I’ll lay in a case or two of cartridges for this thing and that’ll be that. I really only plan on using it for hunting and boonie humping purposes.

So..a new piece of gear to play with.I’m being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century but at I’m getting there.