The Trekker Kettle from Kelly Kettle

We received the Trekker kit by Kelly Kettle just before the WinterMoot, so being in the woods for a week was an excellent opportunity to put it through its paces.

We’ve reviewed a few Kelly Kettles over the last 20 years, but nothing this small and orientated around single-person trekking. At 1.17kg for the whole kit, it’s not too bad if you take into account that includes the kettle, base, pot, frying pan (pot lid), grill, gripper handle, pot support and 350ml cup (with silicone coolip) and the carry bag it all fits in.

Ultimately it’s a Kelly Kettle, and the design has proven itself over the last 100 years – it’s excellent at boiling water which has always been its primary goal. With a 600ml capacity, it definitely falls into the personal cookset category. This little rocket stove will provide enough water for a nice big hot drink or a couple of smaller ones if you’re happy to share.

However, if you want something bigger, have a look at the other products from Kelly Kettle.

It burns hot and quickly brings the water to a boil in 3-4 minutes. Of course, if you have company, you can always boil more water. The trekker is easy to handle, and as long as you follow the instructions, pouring hot water from it is perfectly safe.

Fuel can be anything you find, sticks, pine cones etc. Of course, the dryer, the better, but once you have it alight, it does an excellent job of drying out any damp wood you might be forced to use if dry fuel isn’t available. It’s convenient to have a firestarter of some sort to get it going, but you can use any fire-lighting method that you prefer to get it going.

Because of its small size, there’s not a lot of space for fuel in the base, so you will need a ready supply and keep feeding it if you have it running for more than a few minutes. Adding more fuel is easy; just drop it through the top of the kettle, and it will land in the base/fire bowl and ignite. A word of warning here, it can act a bit like a rocket, with flames coming out the top, so be careful you don’t get burned when you’re adding fuel.

The trekker ‘kit’ comes with extra accessories to turn the kettle into a cooker. While this can work well on the bigger sets (1.2 & 1.6lt), I found that cooking on this small one with the supplied pan and lid/frying pan is an altogether different experience, and to be honest, I will not use them, I’ll replace them with a bigger pan that can accommodate more than an egg. Ultimately, it’s not a great size to cook a meal or even heat up food you may be carrying.


So, if you replace the pot with a bigger one, it’s a lot more useful and ultimately easier, even if it might add a few grams to the weight.

The green silicone whistle is great. It lets you know when the water’s boiled and is safer than the old cork plugs that sometimes got inadvertently left in, not good!

The grill is a nice idea but also suffers from a lack of size, the idea is that you have embers/fire after boiling your water, and you can put the two-piece grill over the heat, but it’s too close to the embers/fire, and too fiddly cook on directly. If you want to heat a pot or cup, you could put it on here for a minute or few, but you’ll soon burn through your fuel.

If you just want to put a pot on the fire/base and not use the kettle, you can do this using the Hobo Stove accessory, which sits on the base, it raises the pot, allowing for more fuel which means more heat or more distance between the heat and the pit allowing for more control if you’re trying to simmer. This works well as long as you have the base unit set up level.

Conclusion:

The kettle is excellent, and I’d be happy to carry this with me for all my hot water needs. It’s easy to use and tough as nails, with no moving parts and impervious to the elements and dirt. There’s no need to carry gas or fuel, just pick up what you need when you need it, which makes it dependable. You can even store kindling and fuel in the funnel of the stove, so you’re ready to go when you stop.
Swapping the pot for a larger one would make it more versatile for cooking.


With a few tweaks, this is a cracking bit of kit which you can checkout Here.