Ultralight Cups

It’s surprising how much weight you can save in small ways. For example, my improved Fancy Feast Stove created a simmer stove which weighs under 15 grams. This shaved 30 grams off my stove weight. Using small aluminum containers to store the various ointments etc you carry has cut nearly 100 grams from my pack weight. A lighter cup such as the one shown cut 21 grams. Somewhere during this process, I culled through my pack and discarded a total of around a quarter of a kilogram (1/2 a pound) of quite unnecessary weight. I am currently modifying my Pocket Poncho Tent so it will take two people (and weigh less than 300 grams including pegs and guys). And so it goes on…

Here are a few ‘cups’ for comparison. The blue $2 shop cup (top centre) weighs 29 grams. I have carried it for over 20 years, and weighed many cups before I settled on it as the lightest. I still think it is probably the solidest. However, here are some other options. The yellow 250 ml cup weighs 16 grams. The 240 ml jar weighs 16 grams (lid 7). The empty Simmenthal 214 gram 220 ml can weighs 12 grams. The red cups weigh 3-4 grams each bare. With the blue plastic handle (bottom cut out) from Aliexpress (pack of 5 for $1.95) it weighed 13 grams. The one with the (unwieldy) felt handle was 8 grams, which I cut down to 7 grams with the sewn felt ring on the scales. This is just polyester felt from Spotlight left over from this propagation project.

The strip of felt quite adequately insulates the hot cup from your hand. You have to wrap an approx 2″ (50 mm) strip around the cup, mark it on both sides with a felt pen, sew (twice) then trim to get a neat conical ‘grip’. It occurs to me I could have made it the full length of the cup if I wanted my coffee to stay warm longer. Usually though on the trail I am impatient to get it inside me!