How to Choose the Best Backpacking Stove
This is one of the better pieces on the site and the framework is intact. The update is mostly that one of the categories has quietly won.
Canister stoves are now the right answer for most people. Screw-on upright burners are light, cheap, instant, and simmer well enough to cook rather than only boil. If you camp in temperate conditions within reach of a shop that sells gas, stop here.
Integrated canister systems like the Jetboil or MSR's Reactor are the specialist version: a burner and pot that lock together with a heat exchanger, boiling water very fast and very fuel-efficiently in wind. They are for melting snow and making hot drinks, and they are poor at actual cooking.
Liquid fuel earns its weight in real cold and on long trips away from supply, because you carry fuel in a refillable bottle and the better stoves burn several kinds. MSR's WhisperLite is still made, thirty years on.
Alcohol and wood remain the ultralight and no-fuel options. Both are slow, both are affected by wind, and wood stoves are illegal to use during fire bans, which now cover far more of the year in much of the western US and southern Europe than they did in 2010.
Two things the original did not have to say:
- Check the fire restrictions before you rely on any open flame. In a total fire ban, a canister stove with a shut-off valve is often still permitted where alcohol and wood are not.
- You cannot fly with fuel or a part-used canister, so plan to buy gas at the destination, and check it exists there before you commit.
Part of the guide to stoves and camp cooking.