Winter is Coming - Will You have Coffee?

It may only be November 7th, but winter is coming.  There's no stopping it.  Soon we'll be seeing winter storm warnings, blizzards, and ice storms.  If you follow me on Facebook, you'll see that I posted a tip from the National Weather Service about how to outfit your car to be winter ready.  However, in this blog post, I'd like to focus on something a little bit more mundane, coffee.

With any winter storm comes the threat of power outages.  Once you've got your firewood stocked, food stored up, and plenty of flashlights, there are the creature comforts to consider.  How will you have hot coffee when there's no power?

My parents ran into the coffee problem in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley back in 2004.  Dad grinds his coffee fresh every morning using an electric coffee grinder and makes a pot of coffee in the electric coffee pot.  After Charley though, there was no power. Mom and Dad ended up driving quite a ways inland to find a coffee shop to have coffee.  They were able to do this because Charley was a small hurricane, in terms of diameter.

However, if there's a blizzard with 24 inches of snow on the ground and roadways, you probably can't hop in the car and drive to where there wasn't a blizzard and get coffee.  Winter storms can cover entire states and more, and it could take days or longer for power crews to come out to restore power.

I propose that with proper prior planning and the ability to boil water, you can have your coffee and drink it too.  First of all, if a blizzard is coming, get some ground coffee, or grind up a whole bunch of coffee before it gets here.  I'd grind a whole pound of it.  You can store it in a sealed container in your freezer to keep it fresh.  Then, you can either use a French Press or a Single Cup Coffee Maker (pictured below) to make your coffee.

A French Press is pretty self-explanatory, but the single-cup coffee brewer is pretty cool.  You put a #2 coffee filter in it, set it atop your coffee cup, put in your desired amount of coffee, and then you pour boiling or hot water through it slowly until your cup is filled.

If we had a blizzard and no power, I'd clear off a portion of our back deck and set up an outdoor kitchen.  I have a Coleman camp stove, fuel, and camping pots/pans/etc. already for camping.  They'd be very useful in such a situation. We'd have no problem boiling water for coffee or cooking anything we desired.