What's In Your Coffee Kit?

Since moving to Israel 14 years ago, I have been commuting about an hour each way to my job in Beer Sheva.

Almost as soon as I started doing this commute, word got around among the Army and University crowd and I began getting requests for 'tremps' (rides) from people in my community (I've written about this at length in the past).

After some time, I began to get 'regulars'; students who had to go south every Sunday morning for the week's classes as well as soldier's serving at bases throughout the Negev desert.

I've mentioned this because at the end of the first academic year, three young women who had been my 'regulars'; traveling with me almost every week, chipped in and presented me with a touching gift:  A 'Pakal Cafe' (פק''ל כפה).  That three letter Hebrew acronym stands for פקודת קבע לחייל which very roughly translates as Standard Equipment for a Soldier.  In the US military it would be General Issue (GI).

So what is a 'Pakal?  Technically it can be anything that is standard equipment for a given task, role or setting.  But if you copy and paste פק''ל into a Google image search, most of the results will be for coffee kits.  And that's what those girls gave me.

Despite its name, Israeli coffee kits are anything but standard.  The ones sold commercially share certain commonalities in that they contain at a minimum:

• A small camping stove
• Fuel for the stove
• Containers for sugar and coffee
• At least 3 small cups for serving the coffee
• A pouch of some kind to hold it all

In case you didn't have the patience to do the Google search I recommended above, here are a few commercial offerings that show the range from simple to elaborate:

The reason these girls settled on a פק''ל as a thank you gift to me was that they'd noticed that every morning I brought a thermal travel mug full of coffee with me for the drive, and assumed (correctly, as it turned out), that coffee played a fairly central role in my daily routine.  Giving me the ability to fix a hot cup of coffee while camping or on a day trip was indeed a very thoughtful gift.

Over the years, my daughter Ariella has 'borrowed' most of the components such as the little butane stove and the coffee/sugar containers.  But despite my having made so many modifications and substitutions in the contents of my פק''ל that it doesn't contain a single item from the original gift kit... in my mind, what I use is still the פק''ל I got from the three University students.

Today my kit includes my venerable old Svea 123R stove (which I've had since the mid '80s);

Instead of the fragile glass cups, I have substituted collapsible silicon cups (which are also easy on the fingers when the coffee is piping hot):

And I use a range of tiny Tupperware-style plastic containers for coffee, sugar and Splenda.

I've been toying with the idea of adding a little hand grinder to the kit, but the expense (about $25 bucks) and extra space/weight has kept that out of the kit so far.

But given that people love to customize and modify their 'Pakal Cafe' (e.g. travel size French Press, mini espresso maker, etc.), I am wondering what's in yours?  Anything unique or interesting?