When your child goes to a school that doesn’t have a cafeteria, you spend a lot of time considering food logistics, whether it’s what to have for lunch or how to successfully transport it. We have quite a collection of metal food carriers, including actual Thermos brand containers. The goal: To have something that started out nice and hot in the morning and still be hot (or at least reasonably warm) by the time lunch rolls around 3-4 hours later.
Surprisingly, it’s hard to find containers that manage this feat, and even when starting out with fully boiling soup, it’s not a rare thing for my girl to come home that afternoon saying she couldn’t eat her soup, it was cold. The same goes for tea, hot chocolate, or even cold beverages like iced tea. Whatever the starting temperature, it seems like everything wants to move to room temperature faster than we want it to do so!
This is where Hydro Flask comes in. Using a different approach to creating a dual-element vacuum seal they’ve created bottles and flasks that do an amazing job of retaining the temperature of what you pour in. I’ve tried it myself: adding ice cubes and water to a Hydro Flask early in the morning just to find that the cubes are still intact 12 hours later when I remember to finish my water.
Based on all the good reports I’d heard from others, I reached out to the company to get a flask in for us to try out and review. The result, a lovely aquamarine 24oz unit arrived on our doorstep (you can see it to the right) and my 13yo daughter K- immediately grabbed it and said “mine!”
The company says that it can keep hot things hot for 6 hours and cold things nice and cold for 24 hours. Why cold works better I’m not sure, but I’m sure there’s some logical thermodynamic explanation! In any case, I just have to report it works like a champ and I’ve since realized that the flask I got from my friends at Ezoic is also a Hydro Flask, which explains why it also does such a great job with cold beverages.
In fact, we decided to test it. At 7pm last night we filled one Hydro Flask with boiling water and another with ice and ice water. At the time our temperature probe showed the cold was 34F and the hot was 193F. Twelve hours later, at 7am this morning, the cold was actually colder – 33F – and all the ice cubes were intact, while the hot had dropped to 142F. Darn impressive!
If you’re used to regular thermos-style travel cups and mugs, the Hydro Flask is a bit freaky at first. Seems like every time I open up mine there are ice cubes still floating in the water or sitting on the bottom, not melting, and yet the outside never has condensation even on the most humid of days.
My personal theory is that there’s a fold in space-time and these are actually gateways to another dimension where the temperature is more stable than our own, but I’m not sure how to test my theory out so they probably shouldn’t use it in their next marketing campaign…
Next up, we need to acquire one of their 18oz food flasks and try it with hot soup, but if the flasks themselves are any indication, it’s going to work so well that my daughter will have to be careful not to burn her mouth on soup at lunch, rather than complain it’s cold.
These are a premium product with a premium price tag, but if you’re just using a single-walled metal or plastic water bottle for your beverages, oh, you have a great revelatory experience to come once you pick up a Hydro Flask. And as a bonus, they have beautiful colors from which to choose too, so if aqua isn’t your thing perhaps kiwi, mango, lemon, sage, or pacific are going to be more appealing.
Disclaimer: Yes, as I said, Hydro Flask sent us a bottle to try out. Which we much appreciate!