the versatile honey stove

Fri, Nov 21, 2008

Now I’m not one to be overly much interested in gear reviews but the blogging world is alight, quite literally, with the new Honey Stove from Backpackinglight. Darren is the current stove king and has been doing a lot of quirky stove videos lately (part one, part two) which you should have a look at if that’s your thing, while Duncan has been going stove crazy on his kitchen table with the thing. Bob@Backpackinglight has also brought out a good video on The Outdoors Station on iTunes. But it suddenly occured to me that this could actually be a great idea as I’m doing the GR221 next year with Penguin, an old friend and we’re planning to bivvy out a couple of nights in the mountains. The Honey, with a Triad stove or Trangia burner and a titanium pot would make a perfect lightweight cooking system at an all in price of 70 quid for the trangia option or just over 80 quid for the triad one. The Jetboil is a superb stove and retails at around 55 quid and a Coleman 250g cannister is about 2.50. So you’re talking about an initial outlay of 60 quid for a Jetboil system. That’s 10 quid cheaper than the Honey + trangia system and 20 quid cheaper than the triad version. But the Jetboil + gas weighs 675g and the Honey + triad + meths would weigh around 550g maybe. So it’s around 100g lighter than the Jetboil and 20 quid dearer. Even if you use the Trangia burner it’s still prolly about 100g lighter than the Jetboil and only 10 quid dearer.

It’s superbly ideal for foreign trips as you can get meths almost anywhere and you can fly with the “stove”, the stove being the Trangia burner. And if you fancy a remote bivvy you can always stuff it full of twigs for a freebie boil-up.

Also, I’m very tempted to get this with the Trangie burner as it’s enclosed (you can screw it shut and keep the meths in) and bung the whole lot in a bag and stuff it in your winter sac. As an emergency stove system it looks very promising indeed. In fact, with a Blizzard Bag and Honey system you’ve got an ideal winter leader emergency setup. It also provides the perfect solution to meths stoves in a snowhole. They just melt their way into the snow and disappear. The Honey keeps the burner suspended above the snow.

I’m off to get one!