Bivo stainless steel cycling water bottles: details and ride impressions
Clean taste, cool colors, and eco-friendly, but not light, cheap, or squeezable.
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The Bivo One is a stainless steel bottle. It’s like a Hydro Flask that fits in your bike’s bottle cage. There are some neat, environmentally friendly features, but it’s relatively heavy, expensive, and you can’t squeeze it.
Bivo founders Carina Hamel and Robby Ringerhis set out to build a non-plastic water bottle to get away from the environmental impact, potential for mold, and the sometimes plasticky taste.
The 21-ounce One bottle weighs 168g. A Specialized Little Big Mouth bottle, for context, weighs about 75g.
The silicone exterior comes in four Easter-egg colors and provides a solid grip inside bottle cages. I tested the bottles in a few different cages on gravel rides, and they stay snug. In the hand, the silicone provides some grip, but the feel is so different than a plastic bottle where squeezing the thing can add to the grip. The upper groove so common to a standard water bottle is absent, which makes it feel more like grabbing a glass — albeit a silicone-wrapped one — than a bike bottle.
The glass comparison also applies to how you drink from it: Since squeezing is not an option, you have to tip it upside down. The nozzle pops open and shut similar to a standard bottle, and an internal straw provides pressure relief so you can drink continuously with vacuum back-pressure.
The flow rate is fairly quick, but not quite as fast as a Specialized bottle when you are tipping and squeezing it.
In terms of packaging and company structure, Bivo is quite green. The bottles are shipped in cardboard boxes and wrapped in paper, not plastic. There is some plastic in each Bivo One, but the company measures it as using 69 percent less plastic than a standard cycling bottle.
The company is carbon neutral, Bivo claims, meaning it invests in carbon credits to offset the carbon dioxide it produces. In this case, Bivo invests in efficient household stoves in India, which the company says decrease greenhouse gas emissions and are healthier for the people in the home than what is commonly used.