Review: Camelbak Steel Podium Bottle

 Pierre Moreels told me that the best insulated water bottles are the stainless steel podiums. During this year's hot summer tour (people actually died in places like Italy and France, where AC is not commonly available), I discovered that our regular insulated podium bottles didn't keep water cool for more than a couple of hours. When I found these bottles for about $30 each, I decided to buy 2 to give them a try.

These look just like the regular insulated ones, except that they're made from stainless steel. They're much heavier than regular bottles, at 354g each. The flow rate on these bottles are great, due to a straw in the middle of the cap which allows air to enter the bottle. You can't squeeze these bottles to get more water, but I have no issues with them.

Here's how incredibly well they work: I filled them one quarter with ice, and then the rest with cold powerade. 24 hours later, they still had some ice left! In fact, your biggest danger with this bottle is that if you treat it like a regular water bottle and fill it with ice and water, after 3 hours you'll run out of water because you still have too much ice left in the bottle!

The biggest con with this bottle is that being made out of steel, unless it's a perfect fit, any metal bottle cages are going to give some rattling with this. Actually, even without a metal cage, if you have ice in the bottle you'll hear some rattling sound from the ice in the bottle! Having a plastic/carbon cage does alleviate the problem.

On cool days, I will take the trouble to switch out to regular insulated bottles or even uninsulated bottles. But on a hot summer day, these bottles are the bee's knees. Highly recommended.