Mazama Miranda on the Go bottle

[Art]

https://mazamadesigns.com/products/m-go-bottle

I wouldnt call it ultralight like they do, but I think the concept is great.

Wide opening for ease of water collection/cleaning and platy/sawyer smaller thread.

 

[Brad W]

LDPE is stiff no? The pictures look like it, so using it as a dirty water vessel is out.

[Jeff McWilliams]

It has other issues.  HDPE bottles (like the HDPE “milky white” version of the Nalgene) slightly deform when you put boiling water in them.  That makes them not 100% bombproof for use as a hot water bottle in your sleeping bag on unexpectedly nights, unlike the Tritan Nalgenes.  I assume that LDPE has the same issue.  In fact i asked Miranda about it on IG and she said yeah, she wouldn’t completely trust it with boiling water in her sleeping bag without putting it inside another waterproof dry sack or something similar.

If I wanted a tall & skinny bottle that was reusable, AND I wanted the ability to use it as a hot water bottle on cold nights, I might choose this product instead:
https://squak.com/products/squaker-bottle

There’s probably room in the market for both products.  The Miranda / Mazama bottle is a cool product.

[Brad W]

That Squak bottle isn’t HDPE, but Tritan which has been shown to leach hormone disrupting chemicals. Would be better to use the 48oz tall HDPE Nalgenes IMO.

[Jeff McWilliams]

Correct, it’s Tritan.

Quoting the internet, “Tritan is a plastic marketed as a BPA-free alternative to polycarbonate. However, studies have found that Tritan releases chemicals with estrogenic activity (EA).”  I remember the days of the original Polycarbonate Nalgene bottles and the Bisphenol-A controversy.

I wouldn’t trust HDPE bottles for boiling hot water.  I had a string of decent luck with the 32oz Nalgene bottle in HDPE… until I didn’t, and one leaked boiling hot water onto my wife.

The tall 48oz HDPE bottles from Nalgene:

1. Won’t fit in a shoulder bottle holder, which is entire the point of the Miranda bottle and the Squak bottle.
2. Isn’t 100% fool proof as a boiling water container as I’ve discussed above and earlier.

 

[Brad W]

I don’t use HDPE for boiling water and I don’t doubt any bottle can fail, but it’s the go-to hot water vessel for winter camping.

Yes, 48oz is quite large.

[Jeff McWilliams]

My Tritan nalgene bottles are my go-to for winter camping.  HDPE gets soft when I put boiling water into them.   When soft, my experience has been that it doesn’t take much for the threads to deform enough that water can leak through.

Thus my conclusion that HDPE bottles aren’t suitable for boiling water.   And if I can’t put boiling water in them, I certainly won’t take them winter camping.

 

[Brad W]

Looks like Cnoc has a bottle coming too. https://cnocoutdoors.com/pages/meet-the-thrubottle?_kx=oNhERex4RH_Hr1rK-PDYaRTO9OPI1Od8-R5-jItynZU.PvZ2x7

 

[Jeff McWilliams]

Miranda posted the following update on Instagram about putting boiling water into the bottle:

@jjmcwill okay, I have an update on this!! Last night I pour freshly boiled water into the MIGO, and actively *tried* to get it to leak – squeezed it (with oven mitts on lol) rolled it around, etc – nada. I think because we designed this to be totally leak proof when squeezed, the boiling water deforming issue you had with Nalgene won’t be an issue with the MIGO.

So, hurray to that!

[Terran Terran]

All the influencers are coming out with products. Then they do their own reviews. It strikes me as a gimmick. They’re mainly experts at nothing.

[Jeff McWilliams]

Terran Terran – one certainly has to learn to take certain product reviews with a grain of salt.

But honestly, is it any worse than the days when all we had to rely on were reviews in Backpacker magazine?  Do you think the picks were completely objective or were they driven by who gave them advertising and/or sponsorships?

I don’t have any issues with any of the three reusable bottles that fit the “Smartwater Bottle” form factor being released.  The market saw a need to replace the disposable PET Smartwater Bottle, and three different small companies have responded.  So what?

And it’s not like the big brands, with theoretically well paid professional designers, have historically done any better or worse with product designs.  Who remembers the MSR Missing Link?  Or the Big Agnes Scout 2 Platinum?  Or the Sierra Designs “Tensegrity” tents?   Dan Durston (and numerous other cottage makers) showed that an outsider who spent his days on the trail rather than in a design studio, can swoop in and take a significant chunk of the market by offering innovative designs and solid customer service.

[AK Granola]

I fail to understand the superiority of Miranda’s bottle over a Smartwater bottle, but I appreciate the effort she’s making to design something for backpackers. The Smartwater can probably be used just as many times as this new bottle, so I don’t see an environmental superiority; neither really gets recycled, so only stainless steel or aluminum would really be better in that respect. I used to carry a canteen- with the hippie style braided strap! – but probably not going back to it.

I don’t see that her bottle would be easier to clean. Honestly I rarely clean my Smartwater anyway, since it never has anything but water in it and I don’t share. Sorry if that grosses the dainty folks out; I have a pretty tough immune system, having grown up in the era of running around barefoot, playing in dirt, and catching small critters bare-handed. A bit of bacteria that I probably contributed to the bottle with my mouth isn’t going to kill me. Every once in a while I do give it a soap and water treatment for good measure and to keep hiking companions happy.

And since I am surrounded by and immersed in unavoidable plastic I am not too worried about chemical leaching at this point, nor am I convinced that the material her bottle is made of is better. Plastic pipes in my house, a plastic home water tank for storage, plastic toothbrush, plastic dental floss, plastic beverage containers, plastic food containers… I’m definitely part plastic at this point. I once thought I could make headway in living more plastic-free, but I’ve given up. Hard to believe plastic was fairly rare when I was a child. No plastic bags, groceries sold in glass jars, etc. I keep telling my kids that, but they don’t believe me.

[Jeff McWilliams]

It would be interesting to ask Miranda, as well as the Squak and CNOC folks their motivations for producing a SmartWater bottle alternative.  The Squak web page says they kept receiving requests to produce one.

I too have owned several SmartWater bottles for months (and months).  They don’t wear out, especially since I’m a not a thru-hiker.  I do a small number of hiking, climbing, backpacking trips a year.  I even put the HYKLYF Genius Sticker on two of my SmartWater bottles so that I could use them to measure water quantities.

The SmartWater bottle is lighter than all three of these alternatives too.  The Squak bottle weighs 5.9oz.   The Miranda bottle weighs 4.65oz.  Google says a 1L SmartWater bottle weighs 1.9oz empty.  CNOC hasn’t published specs on their bottle yet.

My one beef with the SmartWater bottle has been hot water for cold nights.  It doesn’t come up often.  A summer time hike in the High Sierra?  No big deal.  But there have been one or two incidents where I really wished I could have made a hot water bottle.  One was a mid-September hike to Mt Assiniboine.  We had foolishly decided to camp at the designated campsite in the Simpson River Valley below Citadel Pass, and they were experiencing a cold snap.  I think my thermometer registered temps in the mid to low teens that night.  (Fahrenheit)  It’s where I learned that cold air sinks at night, and that my 2012 Enlightened Equipment 20 degree quilt was probably more like a 30 degree comfort rating.  That was the same night my hiking friends put their Sawyer Squeeze filter in the bear locker for overnight storage and found it frozen solid in the morning.  Good times.

[David D]

Smartbottles for clean water last forever but I need to replace the dirty water smartbottles a couple times a year.  It gets beat to death but our water is lively out east and takes a lot of pressure to filter.   Maybe this helps with that

[Brad W]

The bottle diameter is also larger than the smart bottles and may not work in shoulder holders-JustinsUL for example.

[Jeff McWilliams]

how about that!

Miranda was wearing hers in a shoulder pocket in her latest video backpacking the Grand Canyon with Eric Hanson.  Eric doesn’t appear to prefer having a shoulder strap bottle holder.

My current water bottle sleeve is from CTUG, but I don’t remember which one I have.  CTUG has a SmartWater 1L sleeve and a CNOC bottle sleeve.  The CNOC sleeve is speced as .25 inches wider diameter than the former.

[David D]

FWIW the kakwa55 shoulder pocket doesn’t fit a 1l comfortably (hits my face and location is non adjustable) so I use the 700mL there, and this Miranda bottle looks tall and probably has a similar issue

[Jeff McWilliams]

David – I like the 700ml better than the 1L too.  And I’d agree, the Miranda bottle would have the same issue.

 

[Terran Terran]

I prefer the 700 ml until it runs empty. I lowered my pockets.

I’m not sure if the purpose of this bottle. Hot water or dirty water? How do you keep from cross contamination if you’re dipping it in unfiltered water? A CNOC bag, I roll up and put away. I don’t use it for anything else.

[Author]

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