Great tasting Cowboy Camp Coffee Bushcraft Style

Hello, welcome to another video from Far North Bushcraft and Survival. My name is Lonnie and behind the camera is my lovely wife Connie. We're glad that you joined us today. This is a requested video. Somebody asked that I could show how to make cowboy coffee. So today we are going to make some traditional coffee starting from the green raw bean and taking it to the cup of coffee. Hope you'll join us. Okay, I've got the pot ready. We're ready to roast the beans. Now the beans, I got these from a coffee roaster in town. This one happened to be Alaska Artisan Coffees. You'll notice these beans, these are green raw beans. You'll notice that they're smaller than roasted beans. So we'll put in about enough for a couple cups of coffee. That should be good. Now when roasting these, you got to keep them moving just like popcorn, roasting popcorn over the fire. You got to keep them moving. Don't let them get too hot or they'll scorch. And once you start cooking them, don't stop. Don't stop, set them off to the side to add more firewood or do something else. You need to keep it going because you need to cook the inside of the bean as well as the outside. That inside needs to reach a good heat. The bean needs to be a good consistent heat all the way through. So we keep it moving because otherwise instead of roasted beans, you'll have scorched beans. Already you might be noticing that they're turning a little bit something that's commonly referred to as a cracking. What we're after is we're going to go through the first cracking. I'll show you when we hear it. You'll be able to audibly hear it. And then we'll take it to the second cracking. That'll create a fairly dark roast. Okay, as you notice they're quite a bit browner now and they're going through the first cracking. Hopefully you can hear that. A lot of chaff coming off of them. Okay, we'll continue to roast them until we start hearing the second cracking. Okay, here's the the second cracking and it's just starting. See if we can hear it. Yeah, hopefully you can hear that. Yeah, okay, so we'll roast it just a little bit longer here and then when we're ready to call it good, we'll head for the creek and we'll cool it down. Otherwise it'll keep cooking internally. Okay, I'm gonna call that good. Hopefully you can hear that cracking. Okay, let's head down to the creek and get these cooled off. Now you don't want to cool down your pan too fast or you'll warp your pan. Okay, that's probably good for this thin of a pan. So we'll put it right in the creek, cool off that bottom. We'll alternate with shaking the beans which will warm up the bottom and cool off the beans and then we'll set it some more. Of course you don't want to get the water in the kettle. Okay, these beans are still fairly warm. They're easily handleable now. Okay, we'll call that good and we'll head back to the camp and start crush the beans, grind the beans. Okay, I think that's probably about good enough. It's a coarser grind but that'll work great. Now we need to set up our pot stand so we can brew some of this up. All right, we're ready to start brewing. So we're gonna fill this about half full, no more than half full because we don't want we don't want it to take a chance of it boiling over. Yeah, that's probably about right. Okay, now we're gonna get us a good handful here of ground, maybe a little more. Okay, and we don't want to stir them in. Okay, let's hang it and start brewing. In fact, we'll leave this lid off so we can watch the process here. Okay, looks like we need to move this maybe a little bit closer. That looks good right there. Now, see if we can drop it down. We better not, we better keep it right here. Tell you what, we'll lower this leg. There, it's just about right. Now, we'll let that heat up and bring it to a boil. As you can see, the grounds are floating, many of the grounds are floating on top there. As we were recording this video, a moose stepped out of the woods and was pretty curious in us. Okay, while this is brewing, I got a little story to tell. There was a story around the turn of the 1900s, early 1900s, here in Alaska, where the miners would come into Valdez by ship. They would disembark there, they would go up over the mountains and over the glacier and down into the lake there. Then once they would get to the headwaters of the river draining the lake, they would build boats or rafts and they would float down the river, okay, to try to get to the interior of Alaska. Well, this is a pretty rough river and there was occasionally a boat would tip over, a raft would tip over, they'd lose all their gear. Well, the local Indians there, they saw the bounty of that and this one Indian fellow in particular, he found, he was walking up along the river and he found where a miner's cargo had drifted up against the bank of the river and he retrieved some of it. Okay, well, he had some beans that he cooked. He cooked them and he cooked them and he cooked them. He cooked them for three days and the story, the name of this story, was cook them three days beans. Well, they never did get soft enough to eat and he found out later that the beans weren't the kind of beans he was used to, the kind of beans that you eat, the beans were coffee. Once the coffee has reached a good rolling boil and the grounds are all boiled into the water and are off the top of the foam, I like to give it one full minute from that point where the coffee grounds are no longer on top. Okay, it's been a minute, so let's take this off the fire, let it sit for a bit to settle out the grounds, and then we'll be ready to sample the brew. Well, the coffee's cooled down enough now probably and the grounds have had a chance to settle a bit, so let's pour up some brew and give it a taste. Now, when pouring this, you want to handle the pot carefully, don't shake it up a lot, pour it carefully, and you don't want to pour the last bit out of here because there will be grounds in it. And same with the coffee cup, when drinking it, when drinking the traditional cowboy coffee, you don't want to drink the last little bit because there will be grounds in that as well. So let's give it a try. Not bad, not bad at all. Well, thanks for joining me in this video and I'm glad you stopped in. You guys take care and we'll see on the next video. Have a good week. If you enjoyed this video, be sure and give it a thumbs up and to share it, as well as subscribe so you don't miss any more. And check out these suggested videos here. Thank you.