Since I am in a safe space here, I will openly admit that the Snow Peak Aurora Bottle was a ‘grail’ water bottle for me. There’s absolutely no justifiable reason for me to go buy a $150 water bottle, which I will use on a trail and will likely drop a few times over the life of it, when I have dozens of other water holding bottles. There’s no reason for this. And yet, if you happen to hold one of these, you’ll get why people spend the money on this.
Luckily, I didn’t spend my money on this, my wife spent our money on it, and gifted me the world’s best water bottle in the process.
Materials
I’ve had a lot of titanium goods over the years, and there’s one universal truth I have found: there’s average titanium, and there’s amazing titanium — nothing in between. Snow Peak makes goods out of amazing titanium — it’s hard to really say what the difference is, but the moment you touch something from Snow Peak, you get it.
This bottle is no exception, so while the materials are simple titanium with a polypropylene cap and silicone gasket — that so neatly down plays the materials that you’ll double check what they say about it the first time you grab this bottle, assuming they will have some marketing term explaining why this titanium is exceptional — but they don’t.
The bottle is 9” tall by 3” in diameter, and weighs a scant 5.2oz when empty. The titanium itself is a mere 1mm thick, which carries all the way up to the lip, giving you a drinking edge akin to a high-end wine glass.
Titanium is also great as it doesn’t have any aftertaste associated with the metal.
The bottle itself has a slight milled texture to the outside, which runs horizontally as the bottle stands upright. This almost ribbed like texture gives you a secure grip on the bottle, even when it’s wet or cold. The bottles come in a variety of anodized colors, the one shown here is yellow.
In Use
Alright, this is a water bottle, so instead of trudging through using a water bottle, I am just going to hit you with the highlights and “you should knows” with this bottle.
Highlights:
- The texture on the bottle is fantastic, and not something you necessarily see with your naked eye, thus making it really nice when you grab the bottle.
- The amount of turns to remove or secure the cap is nearly perfect. It is plenty secure, but quick to take the cap on and off.
- The color options are fantastic.
- The incredibly thin drinking edge of this is a real gem, and something unexpected, but which very much makes this bottle great the experience of drinking from it is exceptional.
- This is the first water bottle I have ever wanted to take around with me, because I simply enjoy every aspect of it.
The less, highlights, more of ‘you should know though’:
- The cap can make some mildly awful sounds if you are not pretty square when opening and closing it, which is basically always.
- The bottle is very thin, and at some point it will dent. Hopefully that dent isn’t on the opening, otherwise you are not getting this cap back on/off.
- The color I have shows fingerprints really well, and only looked perfect the day I opened it — you’ll need to be ok with that, or try a different color.
Overall
We all have water bottles, and most of them don’t cost much more than $30 — if that. So to say that this is the best water bottle on the market, is not to ignore the price. You likely could buy at least five lesser water bottles for the cost of this one.
You could totally do that.
But then again, that’s not what the readers of this site do, now is it? This water bottle is fucking excellent.