When it comes to shorter trips and moving through the mountains with maximum efficiency, it’s hard to beat the simplicity and streamlined performance of a canister stove.  While MSR was essentially born on the success of a revolutionary liquid fuel stove, our canister stove offerings have come to include one of the most popular backpacking stoves ever sold, and the fastest, most advanced and efficient stove systems ever created.  

Let’s take a look at the backstory of how and why canisters came to be so popular, a loosely chronological timeline of MSR canister stoves and innovations, and what options we offer today. We’ll wrap it with a handy comparison chart. 

Where It All Started

When we developed our first camp stove in 1969, the mission was clear. Mountaineers from Rainier to Everest were getting dehydrated, decreasing their performance and thus, their safety in places where how quickly you can get something done is directly related to your chance of success.

With its remote burner design, the Model 9 stove changed everything. It allowed a windscreen to completely enclose the burner, boosting efficiency without overheating the fuel. This meant a fast and reliable source of water (via melted snow), better hydration, better physical performance, and ultimately, safer trips, more success and bolder objectives.

While this revolutionary innovation is still in use today, there was another type of stove evolving: the “portable gas stove”. First designed by Jue Lafare in 1932 for the French army, this stove sat atop a fuel canister of compressed gas. These were favored because the fuel was stable and easy to transport, and the stove itself was very straightforward to build, operate and use.

This design caught on reasonably well; you might even see similar stoves out in the wild today. However, they had a major flaw: connecting the stove punctured the canister, so it couldn’t be removed until it was empty. Packing a partially used canister with the stove still attached was unwieldy at best and dangerous at worst, making it a major hurdle to broader adoption.

In the late 50’s or early 60’s, the first self-sealing valves began appearing on gas canisters, allowing stoves to be screwed on and off safely. Soon, more varieties of gas stoves followed, as did performance-boosting fuel mixes.

Pocket-Sized Power: The PocketRocket® Lands

Fast forward to 2000: the simple convenience of canister stoves, more readily available fuel and marginal improvements in designs contributed to their increasing popularity. However, durability and performance varied quite a bit, and a lack of canister and fuel standards held the promise of universal compatibility at bay.

Then came MSR’s first canister stove, the PocketRocket. It was an immediate hit, combining a diminutive size, fierce power, great price, ultralight weight and absolute simplicity.

Today, the award-winning PocketRocket remains one of the best-selling camp stoves ever, and has been joined by the PocketRocket 2 and PocketRocket Deluxe. These iterations of the PocketRocket reduced weight slightly while delivering a more robust, stable and compact design. The Deluxe version adds a piezo ignition, performance-boosting internal pressure regulation (we’ll discuss that in a bit) and a broader, wind-protected burner head which adds a little size and a lot of benefit in breezy conditions.

With the original PocketRocket establishing solid demand for canister stove convenience, the engineers went to work figuring out how to address the two remaining Achilles’ heels of the basic canister stove: poor performance in wind, and more consistent performance in cold weather as internal canister pressures dropped.

Separating the Pot and Burner: The Wind Pro™ Stove

Putting a windscreen around a canister of pressurized fuel is a really bad idea, so the first efforts to boost wind protection were focused on separating the stove and canister to allow for the use of a windscreen, just as we had with our original Model 9 liquid-fuel stove. The solution came in the form of the WindPro. Still in our line as the WindPro II, this camp stove uses a flexible fuel line to create distance between the stove and fuel canister. As an added bonus, in addition to being able to use a windscreen, you get significantly increased stability. Plus, thanks to a lower center of gravity and a much stronger stove base, the WindPro easily handles larger, heavier pots. The larger burner head also spreads heat and simmers extremely well, making this one of our most versatile stoves. To boost cold-weather performance, the WindPro II added the ability to flip the canister upside down, which sends liquid fuel directly to the burner, where it is vaporized before combustion, just like a white gas stove. This allows the stove to run stronger as canister pressure props in cold temps. While it burns fuel faster, you can cook confidently in temperatures when a regular canister would just be sputtering along.

Maximizing Efficiency: The Reactor®

Of course, what keeps a stove engineer up at night is the lost efficiency in combustion, so that’s where the team looked next. The answer came in the form of the world’s first camp stove to use 100% primary air combustion—the Reactor stove system. This type of burner doesn’t require air around the flame like a traditional stove does; it brings it in from below, allowing the burner to be completely enclosed in the base of a high-efficiency heat exchanger, which is welded to the bottom of a pot. This roughly doubles the efficiency of conventional stoves, boiling a half-liter of water in just 1.5 minutes, and doing it with a fraction of the fuel, even in windy and cold conditions. To make it even better, we also added a pressure regulator inside the stove. Now found in a number of our canister stoves, a pressure regulator allows the stove to run at low fuel pressures, boosting performance in the cold and letting you get as much fuel as possible out of every canister. 

Multi-Fuel, For Real: The WhisperLite® Universal

About the only improvement you could make to the now-legendary liquid fuel WhisperLite Internationale stove was to add canister fuel compatibility, so we did that next, joyously reuniting entire families that had fallen apart after years of feuding over which stove type was better. Now, a quick swap of a fuel jet and a fuel line adapter lets the WhisperLite Universal keep the peace, offering the ultimate in versatility for people who truly do a little (or a lot) of everything.

Making It Even Easier: The WindBurner® & WindBurner Duo

The Reactor was quickly established as the stove for dependable power and speed in extreme conditions, but that kind of power means heating anything besides water and snow has to be watched like a hawk to prevent burning it to a crisp.

The WindBurner is the bridge, joining Reactor technology and power with everyday versatility. It features a smaller, Reactor-style burner head under a one-liter pot that has become a favorite of everyone from solo weekend warriors to long-distance bikepackers. The compact pot conveniently locks onto the stove and has an insulated jacket and handle so you can eat your food right from the pot while it’s still hot. The stove connection still provides unmatched wind protection and efficiency, but pairs it with better burner control, letting you expand your cooking options.

However, if you want maximum cooking flexibility, the latest WindBurner Duo System uses a remote burner (sound familiar?), so you can use our non-stick 2.5L WindBurner pot and frying pan to satisfy a small group of backcountry foodies. Note that like most system stoves, the WindBurner family is only compatible with WindBurner cookware.

The LowDown Stove Adapter

A common thread you might have noticed throughout our timeline has been finding ways to reap the benefits of separating the stove and fuel source.  While never the most compact solution, this is always the most versatile way to use a stove. A stronger, more stable base allows the use of larger pots and an efficiency-boosting windscreen, while remote flame control makes controlling over-boils a sub-heroic task. 

The LowDown Adapter grants you these cooking powers. You simply screw any MSR canister stove onto remote stand, and the other end onto the canister. Suddenly, a whole new world opens up. Now, with the ability to safely use a far wider range of cookware*, you can cook large or complicated meals with the peace of mind that knocking your entire dinner into the dirt will take more than a passing glance from a well-meaning tent mate, dog or little camper. 

• Note:  If using the Reactor or WindBurner stoves on the Switch Stove Adapter, you must still only use system-matching Reactor and WindBurner cookware.

The Jack of All Trades: The Switch Stove System

Our latest addition to the canister stove line-up, The Switch Stove System, is actually part stove, part stove system. Now, with a single stove, you can go from the compact, high-efficiency boiling prowess of a stove system, to cooking-up complex meals for groups with any cookware you like (up to 8" in diameter). The trick is in the pot supports. 

In system mode, the included 1.0 L pot with integrated heat exchanger boils a half-liter of water in just 2.5 minutes. To make the 'switch' to conventional cookware, simply fold out the pot support extensions from the ring base and your culinary options instantly get a lot broader. It's not as wind resistant as the Reactor or the WindBurner, but its versatility is unmatched. The stove itself is reminiscent of our legendary PocketRocket, but it features a wider burner head for better heat distribution and the easily adjustable burner is fully recessed in a wind-blocking cup for improved wind-resistance.  It's the best thing going if you're looking for one stove to cover you from boil-only backpacking trips at ,and below, treeline, to cooking the ultimate, multi-course brunch on casual, campground weekends with friends.

Fuel Matters

Finally, no discussion about canister stoves would be complete without a word on fuel. Just as with anything that burns fuel, the quality of that fuel matters. 

Our IsoPro Fuel is a proprietary, optimized blend of isobutane and propane. Propane has a very low boiling point (-44°F/-42°C) which makes it a great cold weather fuel. It's at a raging boil on you're average winter day, but that also makes it necessary to contain it in heavy duty canisters that can handle the pressure. Isobutane on the other hand, starts boiling at 11°F/-12°C, making it a lot easier to contain at more moderate temperatures. Adjusting the blend of these two fuels provides the optimal combination of cold weather performance and easy portability. All MSR® stoves are engineered from paper to final product around our fuel blend. Of course, it wouldn't be very useful to you if our stoves ran exclusively on our fuel, but just know that when performance really counts, you should use MSR IsoPro whenever possible.

And that about sums up our 25 year history of making the world’s most innovative and best-selling canister stoves and stove systems. Below is a handy, side-by side listing of our current offerings, along with a few key details to help you sort through them all. Head on over to the linked product pages for more detailed info on each one.

Canister Backpacking Stoves