We don’t use a fancy coffee machine, nor do we use instant coffee. Paul is the Barista. He makes our first coffee of day at around 6.30am, and he makes it the old fashioned way, brewed in a percolator with freshly ground beans. He even weighs the ground coffee, exactly 27gms goes into the percolator for two cups. Our first cup is always black. Later in the morning we have our second cup, and that’s always with frothed, full cream milk. When we’re out and buy a coffee, I’m usually disappointed. Paul makes lovely coffee.

We tried instant when we were off grid. That just didn’t do it! Initially we were tentative about using our power station for running anything with a heating element. I don’t know why. We’d been mainly using it to keep our second fridge/freezer, a 52 litre portable Bushman fridge/freezer running. I’ll tell you a bit more about the Bushman later. Today’s post is all about the all important: Coffee! When travelling between places we usually park up for the night with sufficient sunlight left to put a lot of charge into the power station. Paul tried plugging the van directly into the power station. However, the caravan 3 way fridge found the electrical source, switched off gas, and onto the electrical, subsequently depleting all the power from the station. Then he tried not plugging the van into the power station, and instead used the milk frother and coffee grinder directly onto the station. Eureka! It hardly touched the power available, and now we have our morning coffees, brewed fresh and hot, just the way we like it, even when we’re in the middle of nowhere. All we need is a couple of hours of sun to charge our station. We use a 2000 watt power station, with 300 watts of portable solar panels.

We hadn’t thought of unplugging the caravan 3 way fridge from its electrical source, forcing it to keep running on it’s gas source when off grid. When we leave for our return trip to home in a week or two we’ll try that. We think that having the van plugged directly into the station, without the 3 way fridge sucking up all the available power that everything we use inside the van including our all important, coffee making, stuff, will work as per normal. It won’t matter if it doesn’t work, but a bit more convenience if it does. We’ll see.

But now, my all important second cup of freshly brewed coffee, with it’s frothy milk sitting on top, is all hot and is calling to me. Ahhh, yes – But first coffee!!!!

What a pleasure!