REASONS TO BUY
Lightweight
Easy for one-handed drinking
Re-designed sport cap is effective
Durable
Good color options
REASONS TO AVOID
Sport cap not as secure as a screw cap
Carrying handle is small
Klean Kanteen Classic Review
It is hard for us to find anything bad to say about this bottle, as it's simple, easy to use, and reasonably priced
Credit: Klean Kanteen
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Our Verdict
Though we have tested the Klean Kanteen Classic in the past, we fell in love with this bottle all over again this year. We were wooed by the simple design, new color selections (don't laugh, style is important!), and updated sport cap. The bottle is the perfect size for bike bottle holders and cup holders, sleek enough to have on your desk at work, yet still light enough to take on a hike on the weekends. We also loved the sport cap for road trips — forget trying to get a lid on and off while driving with your knee! The cap is tight, and the silicone spout kept leaks at bay. While we were excited about the updated sport cap, we were truly won over by the Klean Kanteen's versatility. This bottle is at home at the crag, in the coffee shop, or at the gym. If you want a stainless steel bottle that comes close to rivaling the ubiquitous Nalgene Wide-Mouth, this is a fantastic choice.
Our Analysis and Test Results
The simplicity and versatility of the Klean Kanteen Classic have made it a longstanding favorite among our testers. We are impressed with the updated sport cap — which seemed to work better than the previous version. From the coffee shop to the trails, the Classic was our go-to bottle because of its uncomplicated minimalism.
Performance Comparison
The simple beauty of the Klean Kanteen in this photo pretty much sums up our opinion of it - simple, sleek, and aesthetic.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Ease of Use
As more and more bottles flood the market, their designs can get overly complicated with bells and whistles, carrying loops, and protective sleeves. Against this backdrop, the Klean Kanteen Classic is a welcome change. This bottle shines in its simplicity. The bottle itself is sleek and simple in shape. It is slim enough to fit in cup holders and bike water bottle holders but not so tall that it is prone to fall over. It is also fairly easy to clean, especially if you have access to a dishwasher.
The updated sport cap made the Classic take the cake as one of our favorite bottles.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
In the past, we had issues with the sport cap; the cap sucked so much air in while drinking it was both incredibly noisy and provided aerated water that was annoying to drink. That said, we were pleasantly surprised by the Sport Cap 3.0, which is a huge improvement over the previous design. We especially loved the sport cap for driving — no lid to remove — and for using at the gym, where we didn't have to remove the lid to drink or worry about getting the rim dirty. We were most excited about the fact that the new cap doesn't let air in when you drink (something that drove us nuts on the old bottle).
Durability
It's no surprise that the stainless-steel body of the Klean Kanteen is fairly durable. We brought this bottle everywhere - in packs full of metal climbing gear and in bike bottle holders. We weren't shy with letting the Klean Kanteen lie amongst rocks on days out in the boulders. All this abuse hardly took a toll on the bottle — we barely saw a scratch when we wrapped up the testing period this season. The Klean Kanteen Classic ended up unscathed after dropping onto rocks (we noticed chips in the paint on the Summit within the first week of use).
The Klean Kanteen is durable, yet lightweight, making it the ideal companion on any outing.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
The simplicity of the lid also helped the Klean Kanteen in this metric. The silicone spout is exposed to the elements without a hinged cover, which is both a blessing and a curse. Many bottles with hinged lids seemed prone to breaking or more rapid wear and tear. The downside to this feature is the fact that the silicone spout is exposed and thus more prone to getting dirt and grit in it. This can wear out the spout more quickly. We didn't find this to be a huge issue over the two months we used this bottle but could foresee it being a durability issue in the future.
The hardest part to clean on the Klean Kanteen is the sport cap, with its plastic nooks and crannies.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Weight
The Klean Kanteen falls in the middle of the pack in terms of weight among its competitors. This bottle weighs in at 7.4 ounces. These bottles are all similar in volume capacity as well as weight, which makes them good to compare side-by-side in this metric. While the Klean Kanteen has a sport cap, both other bottles have integrated straws, all of which assist in one-handed drinking. With a weight between 7 and 8 ounces, all of these bottles are light enough to take hiking or on the daily commute.
Taste
We found that the sport cap tended to hold flavor, so we tried to use the Klean Kanteen as a specifically water bottle.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
The Klean Kanteen Classic is impressive in this metric. Though we never filled the bottle with coffee — a flavor that tends to linger more than most — we did fill it with electrolyte drinks frequently and found that the fruity flavors never seemed to linger more than one or two uses. After one quick rinse, the bottle shed the flavor of the electrolyte drink and left us with clean, flavorless water. The cap, being harder to fully clean out, did retain a lingering smell of the sports drink, though. It can be tough to compare this bottle's performance in this category to insulated stainless bottles, because we tended to fill those with hot beverages (like coffee or tea) that have more persistent flavors. Being uninsulated, we found sports drink mixes to be the most relevant liquids to use to test flavor retention with this bottle.
From the office to the great outdoors, the Classic kept us hydrated.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Value
The Klean Kanteen Classic is a relatively inexpensive option, especially considering the bottle's durability and versatility. For a non-plastic bottle that is lightweight, portable, easy to clean, and easy to use, we found the Klean Kanteen to be a bottle of excellent value overall. We would recommend this bottle to a friend in a heartbeat - and tell them that it is definitely worth the cash.
It's hard to be the versatility of the Klean Kanteen. Here, it saddles up at the Water Bar for another round of hydration.
Credit: Jane Jackson
Conclusion
With so many options out there, we sometimes freeze when friends ask, “What bottle should I buy?” But, as far as we can tell, the Klean Kanteen Classic is about as close as it gets to a non-plastic, one-quiver bottle. Though it lacks insulation, the Classic fulfills many of the other functions we have deemed important in a bottle. It is not plastic, it is easy to clean, it is fairly straightforward to use and it has proved to be durable over the years. We are thoroughly impressed by the updated sport cap which we found super useful for one-handed, efficient hydrating (especially driving!). Though the silicone spout requires a bit of care to keep clean and to keep from leaking, we loved this feature and the simplicity of the bottle as a whole.
—
Jane Jackson
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