The Kelly Kettle Challenge
Can you boil a Kelly Kettle quicker than Fennel? He's held the UK record for years, and has laid down the gauntlet for you to beat his winter time. Watch the video above to see him do it – and to learn some masterclass techniques to boil your kettle even quicker with the help of custom 'fuel cells' containing Maya fatwood tinder sticks (available from ProAdventure).
If you accept the challenge, then film your attempt, upload it to social media, using the hashtag #kellykettlechallenge, and contact us with the link of where to find it. We'll share it with the Friends and enter your time on the leader board below – if you make it into the Top 10.
Very best of luck!
The Fennel's Priory Kelly Kettle Challenge
Winter League Results (traditional technique)
- Fennel Hudson. Time: 4 minutes, 19 seconds.
- Air temperatire: 1 celsius. Water temperature: 3 celsius. Location: North Wales.
- See yourself here, or higher? Then accept the challenge!
Winter League Results (custom technique)
- Fennel Hudson. Time: 2 minutes, 16 seconds.
- Air temperatire: 1 celsius. Water temperature: 3 celsius. Location: North Wales.
- See yourself here, or higher? Then accept the challenge!
(The winter league runs from December-April inclusive.)
More about Fennel's Kelly Kettle technique
I first used a Kelly Kettle in 1993, when I was given a masterclass in its use by the maestro of tea drinking: Chris Yates. He and I were angling at Jade Lake and, while we were waiting for the fish to bite, Chris made me a cup of tea using his Kelly Kettle. I remember him coaxing some beard lichen from the branches of a fallen beech tree, and peeling dead ivy stems from the underside of the tree trunk, and then making the most amazing leaf tea I’d ever tasted.
I was so enamoured by the experience that Chris got me to make every subsequent brew (I think he liked the idea of having an on-hand tea boy). He gave me the contact details of the Kelly family so that I could order one from them via mail order. I've since been using a Kelly Kettle for all my outdoor brews, and have been experimenting with different fuels and fire-build techniques.
When some Friends and I filmed with the BBC in 2013, the producer was so impressed with seeing my unorthodox techniques that he insisted on fiming a competiton between seven Kelly Kettle users. I won (narrowly beating Stu Harris and Richard Battersby) and have defended the title against all challengers ever since.
Here's my essential guide to using a Kelly Kettle.
History of the Kelly Kettle
A Kelly Kettle is a traditional wood fire kettle designed by Patrick Kelly in the 1890s. Mr Kelly lived in a small farm on the shores of Lough Conn in County Mayo in Ireland. His kettle was originally made from tin (with later prototypes made from copper), and he used it to brew tea for his clients who employed his ghillying and boating services on the lough. He’d use water straight from the lough and boil the kettle with a fire made from driftwood found on the lough’s shore.
Today's Kelly Kettles are made from aluminium, which mades them super-light to carry, though a stainless steel version is also available that offers extra durability – being less likely to dent or melt under extreme temperature. You can still buy them from the Kelly family, from their online store.
Principles of the Kelly Kettle design
The design of the kettle is as ingenious as it is simple. There’s a saucepan-like fire base with an air intake hole in it. This supports the cylinder-like kettle which sits on top. The flames rise though the chimney in the centre of the kettle, which has a wider diameter than the intake hole, thus creating a strong ‘draw’ on the fire.
The cylinder contains water, which in the case of the large ‘family’ base camp model is 1.5 litres, which is added and removed via a circular pouring spout. (Note that the cork bung, which fits into the pouring spout, is there only to stop excessive spillage when carrying water in transit. It absolutely must be removed before use, else explosions of steam and boiling water can occur.)
The fire is started in the base, with woody material added via the chimney. The fire builds and the water boils.
How to use the Kelly Kettle
It’s great fun to experiment with different ways of starting and building the fire, to get different boil times and experiences. The purist will use only materials that can be foraged at the time and place of use, whereas other users (myself included) will also bring a supply of kindling that they’ve found previously and since seasoned and ‘cured’ in their secret accelerants.
For the most efficient fires, always use dry, brittle woody material. If the twigs are bendy, then they're probably damp or unseasoned and will produce more smoke than heat. So try to find dead twigs and branches that remain upon the tree or bush, or are hanging above the ground. Twigs collected from the ground will almost always be damp.
If you’re out and about in wet conditions (either rainy, or early morning when dew’s present) then you can get sticks to burn by shaving off the outer bark with a knife to reveal the dry wood inside. With practise you can also ‘plane’ or whittle the twigs to create feather sticks that have a high surface area and burn brilliantly as both tinder and kindling. (Making feather sticks is a lovely way to spend leisure time when camping. Bushcraft expert Ray Mears has produced a great film on how to make them.)
There are six main stages to using a Kelly Kettle
- Fill the kettle
- Remove the cork or plastic bung and, if your kettle is empty, fill it with water. (Never partially fill a Kelly Kettle, as the water prevents the aluminium chimney from melting.)
- Kelly Kettle users typically bring their water from home, carrying it in a sturdy bottle. (I use the 1.9 litre stainless steel Klean Kanteen bottle, which I carry in my rucksack, and a one-pint Buxton mineral water bottle which fits nicely inside the chimney during transit. I rarely carry water in the Kettle, as my Kelly is old and therefore the bung tends to leak.)
- Alternatively, water can be collected from unpolluted lakes or fast-moving rivers and streams. Be sure to filter the water to remove turgidity/particles by using a Millbank bag, and you’ll need to get the water to a rolling boil and hold it there for four minutes – which isn’t easy using a Kelly Kettle as controlling/maintaining the heat at a steady level requires experience. Filtering and boiling the water for this time is the best way to kill any nasties that might be in the water.
- Prepare and assemble the tinder
- You want your tinder to be super dry, so that it will ignite upon contact with a spark. I keep mine in a tobacco tin in my bag, where it’s always dry, though experts will use a leather pouch and keep it on their person where their body heat will prevent the tinder from getting damp.
- Traditional tinders are:
- Dry grass
- Fluffy seed heads (such as clematis, thistle, rosebay willow herb, or cotton grass)
- Dead bracken
- Beard lichen
- Bark from honeysuckle, birch, western red cedar, and cherry (it easily peels off the trunk or from a fallen branch. Scrape it with your knife to make a highly flammable dust, then add the papery peelings on top)
- Wood ‘punk’ (the dusty remains of well-rotted wood)
- Fungi such as cramp-balls and bracket fungus (which contain amadou).
- The purist will use natural materials, though standard-use tinders are:
- Cotton wool (fluffed up just prior to use to increase its surface area, and/or rubbed in Vaseline for accelerant)
- Charcloth (cotton fabric scorched until black inside a tin placed into a fire – our Friends at Wilderness Pioneers have written an excellent blog showing how to make charcloth)
- Wood planings and straw packaging (like you get in picnic hampers)
- Newspaper. The pulpy nature of newspaper makes it ideal for fire starting when scrunched into a ball. Add one scrunched up sheet of newspaper to the base, and gently push two up into the kettle chimney. Newspaper burns far better than office/writing paper, or magazine paper where the ink prevents a good burn. Newspapers with a red masthead burn best, as their content is more ‘flammable’.
- Add fine woody material
- For the fire to catch, you ideally want super-dry brittle twigs with a high surface area through which the flames will rise. Add a handful of fine material (matchstick thickness or less) on top of the tinder, and then place the kettle on top of the base.
- Especially effective materials are:
- Broom and gorse (highly flammable, even when green)
- Birch twigs or shredded birch bark
- Heather
- Dried peat
- Dried dung (especially sheep and rabbit droppings and dried/brittle cowpats, though make sure to wash your hands after handling them)
- Dead plant stems, such as from nettle or thistles
- Bramble or dog rose (briar) stems
- Elder
- Elm (excellent burner, usually found dead in hedgerows)
- Willow (doesn't burn fiercely, but readily available)
- If you know of other effective tinders or kindling, then please contact us.
- Light the kettle and build the fire ‘heart’
- Kelly Kettles are usually lit with a match or lighter through the air intake hole in the base. Position the hole into the wind (so to create a natural bellows effect), light the tinder and give it a gentle blow for the flame to spread into the kettle.
- (NB: I don’t tend to carry matches or lighters any more, as matches are useless when damp and lighters suffer from low gas pressure in winter. Instead, I carry a firesteel which creates a spark in all weather conditions.)
- As the fire builds, constantly feed it through the chimney with more woody material. You want pencil thickness twigs to start, about 6-8 inches long, keeping on feeding them in so that the fire remains in contact with the wood. Occasionally the twigs will get stuck in the chimney. Knock them down with a larger stick, as ‘hanging’ twigs aren’t in contact with the fire heart and will also choke the chimney.
- Add progressively thicker woody material
- Once you can see flames about 2-3 inches high, then you can add thicker twigs (up to 3 x pencil thickness is optimum) or other woody material such as pine cones or walnut shells.
- It’s now that, if you have to, you can add thick or slightly damp twigs as the fire has enough ‘heart’ to burn them.
- Depending on how quickly you want to boil the kettle, you can either keep adding twigs, or allow the fire to burn naturally.
- Generally speaking, the kettle will boil in 2-8 minutes depending on the time of year/temperature of the kettle and water. (In summer, keep your kettle in direct sunlight so to pre-warm it ahead of use.)
- If you want to learn more about wood fires, then I recommend Out on the Land, the new bushcraft book by Ray Mears and Lars Falt. It’s my new ‘bible’ for forest camping. I also recommend The Wood Fire Handbook and Norwegian Wood – both of which are excellent and highly informative reads.
- Boil and pour
- You’ll hear the water start to boil. Ultimately it will ‘spit’ through the pouring spout. This is your time to remove the kettle from the base and away from the fire.
- Take the carry handle with two hands, one on each ‘arm’ of the handle. Hold the handle perpendicular to the kettle and lift. Doing it this way will prevent you from burning your hands on heat coming through the chimney.
- Once the kettle’s away from the fire, hold the wooden carry handle with one hand, and the chain that connects the bung with the other. Tilt the kettle and pour the water into your teapot or cup.
- Use any surplus water to extinguish the fire, unless youre intending to contunue cooking on the fire using a Kelly Kettle hobo stove.
Custom techniques for Kelly Kettles
There’s a growing fanbase dedicated to the art of boiling a Kelly Kettle. Some enjoy the pure challenge of finding tinder and kindling from any location and boiling the kettle in seemingly impossible conditions (such as digging up pine stumps from a bog in torrential rain).
Others – like me – create custom ‘fuel cells’ from cardboard tubes into which they add things like pencil shavings, wood planings, crushed charcoal, Maya fatwood sticks – either as planings, splinters or whole), slithers of bicycle inner tubes, grated candle wax, and rotten 'spongey' wood soaked in paraffin oil. The list is endless.
And if using cardboard rolls, poke holes in them prior to use so that they catch a flame. (If using a series of fuel cells, Number 1 should have the largest holes, and then the holes get progressively smaller with each cell, so to time the release of their contents.) Paper rolls are better, but become damp quickly.
In the video above, I use three fuel cells – each of which I rub with Vaseline prior to use.
- The Primer. This contains cotton wool mixed with planings and splinters of Maya fatwood sticks. The cotton wool is rubbed in paraffin oil. It has an oily, but not wet, texture.
- The Accellerant. Charcoal dust and 4-inch splinters (matchstick thin) of Maya fatwood sticks, capped each end with cotton wool.
- The Fire-heart. Pencil-thick sticks of Maya fatwood, with the gaps between them packed with charcoal dust and crushed-up charcoal. I pour a small amount of melted Vaseline into the tube then seal it with cotton wool rubbed in paraffin lamp oil (Vaseline is a suitable alternative).
Cover the lot with bone-dry kindling until the Kelly Kettle chimney is two-thirds full. I use kindling taken from floorboards that were once treated for woodworm, so are impregnated with a resin. I split it until it's pencil thickness.
NB: The wooden coffee stirrers found in coffee shops are a good source of kindling, though as they're made from poplar like matches, they tend to burn slowly. Always be on the lookout for potential sources, be they from rural or urban locations.
It's also possible to make special Kelly Kettle fuel ‘sausages’ by hammering paper pulp mixed with sawdust through 3-inch plumber's waste pipe. You then dry and coat the sausages in a mixture of melted candle wax and lamp oil which somehow produces different coloured flames.
It won’t be long before a clever chemistry teacher (Professor Snape, do you fancy a challenge?) invents a harmless pellet or powder that changes the colour of the smoke rising from the kettle. Wouldn’t that be fun!
Connoisseur techniques for Kelly Kettles
Some Kelly Kettle devotees experiment with woodsmoke aromas. Favourite aromas of mine are from dried peat and heather, pine needles, fruitwoods such as apple or cherry, and the pineapple-like scent of Western Red Cedar needles. I’ve even seen someone add a few joss-sticks to the fire to get an especially ‘mellow’ scent.
It’s hugely atmospheric, especially for those boil-ups done at night, and enables regional variations to technique depending upon what kindling you can find on your adventures. Experiment and decide which you like most.
Kelly Kettle character
Kelly Kettles look better with age. When new, they’re as shiny as a polished milk churn. But with use (this refers to the aluminium variety) they will take on a pewter colour through oxidisation and smoke residue. I’ve seen 100-year-old kettles that are black with tar and soot. Absolutely gorgeous. Never clean a Kelly Kettle. The older they look, the better.
A note about safety
Kelly Kettles are possibly the quickest and most fun way to boil water outdoors. Collecting twigs and then building a fire brings out the boy scout in everyone, and combining it with the pleasure of drinking a cup of tea in the open genuinely enhances the outdoor experience.
However, fires and boiling water pose risks of burning and scalding if you don’t respect them.
In the video above, you’ll see me getting relatively close to the fire to blow into the kettle and build a furnace-like environment. I’m experienced at doing this, and so do not suggest it to the amateur. Likewise with custom fuel cells.
Be sensible. A Kelly Kettle is not designed for super-high temperatures that can be achieved through the use of fierce accelerants. Neither me or Fennel’s Priory accepts any liability for injuries sustained when using a Kelly Kettle, or for damage to your kettle should you use fuels or techniques for which it was not designed. You have been warned!
If you like this blog, then you might be interested to read 'Kelly and Me', a chapter in Fine Things, Fennel's Journal No. 8 in which Fennel describes his experiences with Kelly Kettles to date, and shares some extra hints and tips.