Esbit Spirit Stove Set

A reliable, compact cooking system. Easily large enough for one or two people, but compact enough for any pack. I use it regularly now, it's replaced my Trangia 28.

I've been looking at one of these on the internet for a while, and when the opportunity arose I picked one up.

You can pick one up for about £35 shopping around. It consists of two hard anodised pots (985ml & 470ml), a stand, a brass meths burner (similar to Trangia), a stand for burning fuel tabs, and a mesh storage bag.

It fits together to make a fairly stable cooking system, with the smaller pot being used as a lid. You have a choice of using either the meths burner or the fuel tab stand. If you added a wire mesh over the bottom it might be possible to use it as a twig burner, although the plastic feet might melt, although you could replace them with metal ones without too much trouble.

The Meths burner has a snuffer/simmer ring included, which has the useful addition of a fold out handle, which makes putting it onto the lit burner much easier.

The pots are of a fairly useful size, although I'm not sure how useful the small pot would be as a frying pan, but I've managed with a Trangia 28 before without too much trouble.

They both have fold out stainless steel handles that are covered in silicone rubber for heat protection. Packed, everything fits inside the pots with room to spare for odds and ends. I tried it out using IPA (Isopropyl Alcohol) which I "borrowed" from the solvent store at work, and did a timed boil of 500ml of water.

It lit easily and was soon blooming with plenty of flame... It took 12 mins to get to a rolling boil, which isn't brilliant compared to a Jetboil, but still not too bad. Sadly I don't have any Esbit/Hexi blocks to try, but I expect similar boil times.

Overall I'm quite impressed. It's a nice compact reasonably lightweight package (470g, with a full burner). It fits together well and is easy to use. You could replace the Trangia burner with a photon stove easily enough to save a little weight, but as a brew kit it's pretty good as it is. I can see myself using this quite a lot.