Stoves. I hope you plan to cook the can of worms you just opened :p
What are your trade offs? what would you prioritise? You can generally have only some of the below:
1) Affordable
2) fast
3) resilient in the wind
4) efficient
5) clean to use
6) lightweight
7) stable
Let's come back to 1.
For fast, you can't really beat the jet boil type stoves. I had a pre production review unit for the alpkit clone. I am pleased to see all my feedback was taken on board. The unit I had would boil 500ml of water in a couple of minutes, and would do so on just 5g of gas. Very efficient. But it is a one trick pony. You boil water, nothing more. Fine for heating up a boil in a bag meal. But try to heat up a tin of soup and you're more likely to weld it to the bottom. But for a cuppa on the road, hard to beat.
The trade off for the jetboil and clones is weight. They are not small, they are not light. You could go with the BRS3000 or any of the many similar stoves like that linked above. Be careful tho, some of the cheap chinese stoves have a nasty habbit of exuberant unexpected disassembly. They are also atrocious in the wind, unless you get one of the fancier ones like the MSR pocket rocket deluxe, even then it's not fantastic, but it's better than the rest. The other downside of the canister top stove is they are not very stable. This is a problem for the jet boil as well.
You can get remote canister stoves, but the issue you run into then is they are bulkier, and often heavier.
Kim mentioned the trangia, but there's a lots more to alcohol stoves than just the trangia. I have an Evernew titanium clone of the trangia, and it's amazing. For a meths stove it's fast, it's light, and it works well. At boiling water.
The problem with a lot of these stoves is you can't turn them off, and you have to basically burn all the fuel you put in them. The trangia does allow you to store fuel in the stove, but it's a heavy unit. I have a zelph starlite stove, which does allow you to put the lid on, and store fuel in the stove. It's lovely. It's light, it's efficient. and it's bloody slow. BUT. The big weakness of meths stoves is the cold, below about 10°C, they become a pain to light. If I have a meths stove on a winter trip I keep the fuel bottle inside my jersey for a bit before I use it, to warm it up a bit.
What about esbit solid fuel stoves? Well they work. But they are messy. You can't turn them on/off, they leave a horrible residue, and they are slow. And you have to worry about the wind.
So what does this boil down to? (sorry).
Pick what is most important to you. Want fast and efficient, get a jet boil. Want cheap, light and reasonably fast, get a stove top gas unit. Want cheap, light, and don't care about the speed, get a meths stove like the zelph starlite (and a pot stand and wind shield).
I have a selection of stoves in my collection. The one I use for big trips is a primus omnilite. Why? Because I don't have to worry about fuel. I can run it on a gas can, I can run it on petrol, I can run it on av gas. "But you can get gas canisters everywhere!" I hear you cry. Can you tho? A few years back my then housemate was going hiking with his mum in Northern Italy. I offered to lend him my MSR Whisperlite international stove.
"It's ok, I've got my gas stove we'll be fine" said his mum
"you won't be able to find gas for it" said I
"Sure we will, it's standard" she replied.
I didn't push the matter.
Two weeks later said housemate staggers up the stairs into the flat.
"Turns out you're right about the gas canisters"
"Oh?"
"Yep, we could get gas all right, but none of them had the right fitting for our stove"
"Let me guess, blue camping gaz"
"Yep"
"What did you end up doing?"
"I had an esbit stove with me, we used it for the whole trip"
We think that the threaded canister is standard, but it's far from universal. In France and some neighbouring areas, the blue camping gaz pieced containers are the most common, and to get a threaded unit can take a lot of distance. You can get adaptors, but that's going to add weight, and bulk. This is why I love my omnilite. I don't have to worry about fuel, I can always find a petrol station, or maybe a farmer has some diesel. It'll burn everything, apart from meths. But that's fine, cos I also carry my zelph starlyte. That thing weighs less than 20g. My omnilite ticks off everything apart from affordable.
On the subject of fuel canisters. If you go the gas route, get the MSR ISOPRO ones. They have a gauge on the side, pop in a pan of water, and see what level it floats at, read off the markings, and you know how much fuel you have left.
Hopefully this helps a bit.
J