We’re big fans of canister stoves and their compact designs, which allow you to keep your camp cooking essential in a small pocket on your backpack or jacket. Granted, you’ll still have to bring a fuel canister and a cooking pot along, but the stove itself will barely take up any room in your stash. The Primus Firestick takes the classic backpacking stove and collapses it to an even more compact size.
While most camp stoves that mount to canisters are already small enough to fit in plenty of pockets, this one does them better by collapsing into dimensions similar to a small flashlight, measuring just 1.4 x 4.1 inches (diameter x length). That means, you can keep this thing in your pants pocket if you feel like it, making it quite possibly the most compact product in its category.
The Primus Firestick has a burner that’s completely covered up with three walls and a twist-on cap when collapsed, ensuring it won’t get damaged even when stored in crowded backpacks and pockets. During use, those side walls that cover the burner can be tilted down from the central section at a slight angle, allowing them to serve as stable supports for your pans and pots when cooking. Each of the side walls, by the way, is anchored at the lower section of the stove, so this should provide durable and stable support, regardless of the amount of food you’re cooking on top.
The burner can produce flames at 8530 BTUs (2500W), making it powerful enough to bring a full liter of water to boil in under five minutes, so it will let you cook food, brew coffee, and heat water without taking forever. It sits recessed inside the side walls, too, allowing the walls to serve as windscreens keeping breezes and gusts of air from putting out the fire while you’re cooking. Just like other backpacking stoves, the whole thing is designed to mount onto fuel canisters, allowing you to use the fuel container as a base for propping the stove upright on various types of outdoor surfaces.
The Primus Firestick has a matchstick-style piezo igniter, so you can quickly light it up using just one hand (no lighter needed), while a control valve makes it easy to adjust the flame with precision, allowing you to set it to full blast when boiling water and lower it significantly to simmer a sauce you’re making for dinner. It comes in two models: a standard one cut in stainless steel and an ultralight variant made from titanium.
According to the outfit, the flame on the burner is very focused, making this ideal for using smaller cookware, which is what most backpackers will likely carry. They also recommend using it with the outfit’s camping-specific PrimeTech pots, which use heat exchangers to spread heat evenly across the entire bottom of the cookware, in case you want to use a larger cooking vessel (they have 1.3-liter and 2.3-liter variants).
The Primus Firestick is available now.
- streamlined, ultra-packable stoves: primus firestick stoves are designed to occupy as little space...
