The Ortlieb Coffee Filter Holder

I started writing this post something like 5 years ago. I just never got around to finishing it and promptly forgot about it. Just recently I was reading this post from Stu on the Bear Bones MYOG forum and the same day saw this tweet from fellow boner Shafiq. They reminded me that I had written something about portable coffee in the past, so I thought I would finish this off and post it.

I drink coffee. I like coffee. I want decent coffee. I use a stovetop mocha pot at home, my own coffee machine at work and numerous coffee accoutrements and paraphernalia. I’m not a total coffee snob, I’m not going to start talking about water flow, extraction times and atmospheric pressure but I don’t drink instant either. This is clearly a problem when out in the wild, so I pretty much always carried tea bags when I might want a brew.

Back when I bought this I really wasn’t looking for a solution to this problem. I had resigned myself to just sucking it up and making do with tea. However, in yet another trip around the internet looking at gear I didn’t need, I stumbled across the Ortlieb Coffee Filter Holder. My only experience of Ortlieb is their panniers, which are frankly awesome, I thought it might be worth a punt (although I think Sweary Dave might have something to say on the quality of their saddlebags).

To operate you simply slide a couple of tarp pegs into the tabs on either side, add a paper filter, your favourite coffee and hot water. It folds flat and if it hadn’t been me that packed it, I wouldn’t even know it was there. I have used this on numerous bike packing trips, laying in the bivi making a brew on a cold morning and it has always done the job nicely. I even took it to my Nan’s on last weeks back to back 200s trip because I knew there would be no coffee at her house. 

To be able to make this filter holder so portable they had to go down the “soft” route, so it’s made out of the same material as the panniers I mentioned earlier. This means it’s light weight, at 30g, and basically indestructible. If there was a planet level extinction event all that would be left would be cockroaches, Ortlieb panniers… and that bottle of Advocaat that your Nan’s had on the shelf since 1973. I can personally a test to this as this really is a very long term ‘review’. So long in fact that they seem really difficult to find this these days, which is a real shame.