Performance Comparison
The ubiquitous Nalgene remains a staple in the inventory of any lover of the outdoors.
Photo: Ross Robinson
Ease of Use
This bottle's simple design is a big advantage. It consists of a cylindrical body and a screw cap, with a retaining strap that attaches the two main components. This allows you to take a gulp while hanging off a cliff without having to worry about losing your cap. We used the retaining strap for clipping onto our pack, but this isn't necessarily recommended.
The Nalgene boasts one of the widest mouths of all the bottles tested in our review, which has its pros and cons. The wide mouth does make filling the bottle a breeze, virtually regardless of the water source. If you were desperate, it would, by definition be able to catch the most rainwater over a set amount of time. However, we found that the wide mouth also made it harder to drink from without splashing water down our chin, chest, and elsewhere. If you are moving at all, including sitting in a moving vehicle, you can expect to get a mini shower. On the plus side, the wide mouth also makes it a breeze to clean.
Pro tip — Get a
bottle insert like this one to drastically improve the drinking experience from your Nalgene. It greatly reduces the chance of spilling on yourself while moving and drinking. Some of our testers have been using these in their Nalgenes for years.
Plastic bottles are durable, versitle, and light weight. The Nalgene is a tried and true classic.
Although its large volume reduces the number of times we had to fill it, the bottle feels substantial in hand. For folks with small hands, it can feel a little cumbersome to drink from one-handed. Furthermore, there isn't a cup holder we came across that could accommodate this bottle's wide girth. Since it's more awkward to drink from in day-to-day use, the Wide Mouth fell back from the top of the pack in this metric.
Leakage is not a problem whatsoever with our Best Buy winner. It passed our leak test with a score of 100 percent. We gave this bottle our complete confidence, and it did not fail us when being jumbled around inside backpacks while cycling and hiking. It is also reasonably quick to open and close, requiring only one cap revolution to screw/unscrew the cap.
Durability
This is a strong bottle. The plastic body and cap can endure many drops and tumbles and still maintain their integrity. In our drop tests, the Nalgene only suffered minor scrapes and bounced around like a football before coming to a rest on the ground. Even when dropped on its cap, it showed only small scuff marks. There's a possibility that the cap and (less likely) the bottle may shatter when dropped more than 10 feet. However, through regular use, we expect this bottle to survive much more often than fail.
Throughout our testing, we did not experience any problems in the durability of the retaining strap. Nonetheless, this is the weakest point of the bottle. During any activity where you depend on this bottle as your sole water source, we don't recommend hanging it by its strap.
Minor scratches at the base from the drop test.
Photo: Ross Robinson
Weight
Taking OutdoorGearLab measurements, this one came in as our lightest bottle with a rigid body. After testing, the Wide-Mouth was the lightest and easiest to use, even beating out some of the collapsible competition. The Wide-Mouth also weighs only 0.20 ounces per fluid ounce. Its low overall weight and large capacity make it a common favorite for multi-day trips in the backcountry. It also pairs with several water filters.
Although you can attach this bottle to your harness to carry it hands-free, we preferred to only do this when on the ground.
Photo: Ross Robinson
Taste
This product scored as well as most other plastic bottles we reviewed in the taste metric. Although we did prefer the taste of drinking out of glass to any other material, the Wide Mouth performed admirably. It does not impart any plastic flavoring into its contents. Even after leaving the water to sit in the bottle for 24 hours, we couldn't distinguish any plastic-like flavor in our water from the Nalgene's body. It was no fresh spring water, but it also lacked any flavors imparted from the body. If you plan on using your bottle for liquids other than water, you need not fear the Nalgene. Each bottle was filled with a sports drink mix and left for 24 hours. Next, we hand-washed each bottle with warm water and dish soap before filling them with water and performing our taste tests.
Our taste testers noted that the Nalgene retained a faint smell of the sports drink mix used in the test. However, they could not detect any effect on the taste of the water. After cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, the smell disappeared completely.
Ross Robinson takes a fresh gulp of water after climbing. Even if you leave water in this bottle all day, it will still taste like water, not plastic.
Photo: Ross Robinson
The folks at Nalgene proudly say that their bottles resist flavor retention and our tests verified this claim.
Value
This product is exceptionally valuable and is our Best Buy winner of all water bottles we reviewed. It's impressive how much utility you can receive from this bottle. It won't cost a lot, is versatile to suit your needs, and will last for years.
With its rigid plastic body providing decent insulation, this bottle kept its water from freezing during 1-2 hour ice hockey sessions in Minnesota.
Photo: Ross Robinson
Conclusion
There is clearly a reason that the Nalgene Wide-Mouth has been so ubiquitous in the world of outdoor recreation for the past few decades. It delivers a durable bottle that is also lightweight and easy to clean. You can mix sports drinks in the bottle without forever ruining the taste of future water refills. It has a few tricks up its sleeve too that make campsite cooking and cold winter nights a little easier. We feel confident using this bottle in just about any backcountry activity. It isn't our first choice for an everyday bottle, but for the price, we feel that there's still money in the bank for a bottle more suited for that. If you enjoy the outdoors, you're going to find lots of uses for this bottle.
The unofficial wide mouth OG.
