Coleman Hyperflame Fyrecadet Review

The Coleman Hyperflame is a powerful and sturdy stove with a lot of potential. It has the fun feature of being able to remove the burners and snap in a griddle or grill, accessories available separately from Coleman. Unfortunately, this stove cooked a little too hot and unevenly for our liking, and overall didn't measure up to the other stoves we tested.

Performance Comparison

Time to Boil

With 11,000 BTUs per burner, this stove did decently with boiling. It boiled a quart of 60-degree water in 4:30 and a quart of 50-degree water on a cooler day in 5:10. On their own, these aren't bad times, but other stoves simply did better, even those with lower BTUs. With as hot as this stove cooked food, we were shocked it wasn't able to boil a bit faster. For comparison, the Everest clocked in at 2:30 for the 60-degree water and 3:30 for the 50-degree water.

Wind Resistance

Simmering Ability

This is the category where the Hyperflame really let us down. This stove cooks SO hot and fast, it was near impossible to manage any delicate meal. You can turn the flame down very low, but it's hard to tell that it's still on, even though the heat is still raging. We tried cooking a raw sausage patty and in minutes the outside was cooked to a hard brown crisp while the inside remained raw. Finishing the meal required breaking the sausage apart into small pieces.

At the end of it all, we were left with a very charred pan that only a good soaking could get clean again. We also noticed that despite the large wide burners — burners we thought would distribute heat equally — almost all our meals cooked unevenly.

Ease of Set Up

This is a very easy stove to set up. The lid lifts up, and a small arm folds down to hold it in place. The metal fuel adaptor lives in a compartment in the bottom of the stove, a feature that we loved and that this stove did best. With most other stoves of this type, the adaptor gets packed inside where it rattles around noisily when being moved or carried.

Ease of Care

The cooking grates on the Hyperflame stove can be detached entirely, helping to make cleaning straightforward and easy. However, there are recesses all around the burners that are impossible to reach and that are bound to get filled with crud over time. It's not as good a design as the tried-and-true setup of more traditional models or some of the more innovative designs that allow you to remove the drip tray entirely.

Portability

This stove packs down to 23.5 x 15.5 x 5 inches, on the larger side for the two-burner tabletop models we tested. The main reason for the slightly larger dimensions is due to a giant handle. It's nice for carrying, but a bit awkward at times when you're trying to Tetris things into the back of a car.

Best Applications

The Fyrecadet has a good design for slightly larger groups. It is a compact two-burner tabletop model, but provides a large cooking area and decently high BTUs. The lack of a windscreen means that you can fit wider cookware on the burners and, if you want to buy accessories, you can pop off the burners individually and attach a griddle or grill instead. We did not try these accessories so we cannot attest to how well they work.

However, if your camp meals tend to require lots of slow cooking and sautéing, this stove will frustrate you. It cooks hard and fast no matter how low you have the flame.

Value

At $150 this is model is on the pricier side. If it cooked better, we would deem it worth the price, as it's a solid design with some good things going for it. But as it stands, it feels expensive for what you get.

Conclusion

While the Hyperflame provides nice wide burners, a well-functioning auto-ignition system, decent wind resistance (considering there's no windscreen), and some cool accessory upgrades, we can't recommend it to anyone without a serious warning regarding how hot it cooks. Across the board on sites like Amazon, we saw complaints about burnt food and the lack of a truly low setting. It's unfortunate because, without this issue, it would be a solidly performing stove.