For my winter trip to Ladakh, I had a lot of choices as to what water bottle to bring. While I enjoy using water reservoirs in my backpack on hiking trips, they’re not all the best things to bring on trips where the temperature may regularly be less than 0 degrees Fahrenheit (unless you have an insulated sleeve for the reservoir and tube).
- Stainless Unibody Bamboo Cap.
- Laser Etched For Life.
- A Fine Finish.
It’s hard to have a favorite in this category, so I went to a brand-new bottle I’d received for testing: the Klean Kanteen Insulated Reflect 20-ounce bottle.
This bottle uses sustainably harvested bamboo, food-grade silicone, and stainless steel in its construction. Nothing extra. There’s no paint or plastic.
That’s good for folks who are interested in simplicity of design as well as sustainability and keeping things as eco-responsible as possible.
The stainless, unibody bamboo cap is cool and sleek, but because it’s got steel in its construction (completing an all-steel interior), you’ll want to avoid putting boiling-hot liquids in the bottle. I didn’t have a problem with liquid between ice-cold and a few minutes after being boiled.
The interior, which is electro-polished, doesn’t retain or impart flavors. I easily switched between having masala chai and water in my bottle, and didn’t have issues with flavor bleed between the two.
The thing that impressed me most is that the double-wall, vacuum-insulated construction kept my water cold for hours. Klean Kanteen claims cold contents stay cold for 24 hours, and iced contents stay cold for 40 hours, and my experience was very close to that.
Even though I didn’t put actual ice in the bottle, I got some of my water from a near-frozen stream, so I’m going to say that counts as almost iced.
My favorite thing was that the water in my bottle didn’t freeze overnight, while I slept in my tent in sub-zero tempreatures. I placed the bottle on a thin mat (less than a quarter inch), and draped a thick Ladakhi blanket over it, and had water to drink in the morning when some of my companions had ice in their Nalgene bottles.
- Stainless Unibody Bamboo Cap.
- Laser Etched For Life.
- A Fine Finish.
The Klean Kanteen Insulated Reflect 20-ounce bottle comes in brushed stainless and mirrored stainless and lists for $40.95 on the Klean Kanteen site.