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Backcountry Brews: Essential Beer Accessories for Your Next Camping Trip

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camping with beer
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The weather is slowly warming up and the skies are clearing. Spring and summer are right around the corner, beckoning you outdoors and away from the smog of the cities to seek out clear night skies, full of stars. Camping trips allow you to experience some of life’s greatest pleasures. Mornings are for coffee heated over the camp fire. Lazy days are spent reading in hammocks, fishing in the creeks, or hiking through the tall trees. In the evening, when everyone has returned to camp, it’s time to enjoy a few beers before starting it all over again tomorrow.

To make the most of your brew consumption on your next camping adventure, you’ll need to remember a few things and invest in some beer accessories.

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Tips for Buying and Transporting Beer

  1. Canned beers are lighter, more resilient, and easier to pack and transport than glass bottles.
  2. You need a decent cooler to keep the beer cold with minimal trips to refill ice. (These coolers are all great options.)
  3. Bring enough beer to share. The stillness of the campground is a great time to settle in and compare notes on your favorite brews. Beer is also a great social lubricant for those long, fireside chats where you and your campmates solve the world’s problems.
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Best Beer Accessories For Camping

Growler

stanley growler
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If you insist on bringing your favorite draft-only microbrew with you into the outback, there are several rugged growler options that beat traditional glass. The retro stylings of Stanley’s Classic Vacuum Insulated Growler harken back to the good old days with its industrial green color and made-to-last components.

Wine/Beer Bladder

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Platypus makes a line of plastic wine bladders named PlatyPreserve that can also hold beer in a pinch. Once emptied, the bags pack completely flat. With a four-pack of these wine bladders, you are easily able to bring four different types of beer or a mixture of wine and beer, if some of your camp mates aren’t big on brews.

Portable Chiller

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If a 65-quart Otterbox cooler isn’t in your budget, you may be stuck with a weekend’s worth of food filling your puny cooler with no room left over for beer. Thankfully, the Chill-O-Matic Automatic Beverage Chiller cools cans down in 60 seconds with just a handful of ice.

Instant Coffee

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For the morning after, when you need that extra pick-me-up, Stoked Stix from Stoked Roasters and Coffeehouse make that first cup of coffee incredibly simple and tasty. It’s instant coffee that doesn’t taste like instant coffee. And if you’re going to do this all again tomorrow, you’d better start the day off right. There are also a number of other, such as Voilà, that will also easily wake you up.

Article originally published October 14, 2017. Last updated February 2019.

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Lee Heidel
Lee Heidel
Lee Heidel is the managing editor of Brew/Drink/Run, a website and podcast that promotes brewing your own beer, consuming the…
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