I like drinking out of glass. It feels like it doesn’t impart any flavor or smell to the quaffed liquid, and it has a certain cleaness. Old quart mason jars work great, and they fit a lot compared to a dainty little teacup. Laughter, the office queen at Xtracycle, makes custom holders for almost any shape of jar — she weaves them out of cattails and calls them bottle baskets. She made me one for my birthday last year and I loved it for awhile until some lame-o feline took a leak on it.

For the office-car-home-cafe type, the bottle basket works fine. But for the renegade rock-hopping, bike-crashing set, even protected glass won’t cut it, and it’s heavy to boot.

Enter Nalgene. Indestructible plastic, and in the handy 1-liter size. There’s two kinds of Nalgenes: the opaque white kind that gives your fluid a plastic-y taste and stink and the clear kind that doesn’t but should. It should because an increasing body of evidence suggests that even though it may not taste like plastic, there might be little plastic beasties leaking out of it into you. Some of these little beasties are called endocrine disruptors. Nuts and ovaries are part of the endocrine system. If they get disrupted…

So let’s not disrupt them more than we have to I say. Exit Nalgene and other plastic bottles. I don’t mean to dig on one company in particular, or to say definitively that drinking out of their bottle will screw you (or your kids) up. But the research seems to suggest at the least that we BE CAREFUL! There’s this thing called the Precautionary Principle; it’s kind of like a guilty-until-proven-innocent for the potentially hazardous choices that we make or that companies and governments make on our behalf. If you haven’t proved that radiation isn’t bad to eat, don’t put it on your Frosted Flakes (Now with Glowing Crystals!); if you haven’t proved that little plastic beasties won’t make your kids have two weeners, don’t drink them!

Which brings us to the Klean Kanteen. Made of stainless steel, almost as exciting to drink out of as glass, and a helluva lot better to drop on the ground. And they make one that fits right in your bike’s water bottle holder. The other size is about 44oz or so for the heavy drinkers out there. There’s something about tasty water that makes you want more of it.

I think we’ll start selling them ourselves soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Bicycles, Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.