Ultimate Direction Body Bottle

I got this to keep in my jacket when snowboarding rather than invest in a Camelbak. After using it a few times, I have mixed feelings.

Pros: The small size fits nicely into a larger interior pocket in my snowboarding jacket, and the bag itself seems well-made and doesn't leak when closed.

Cons: The bite valve has an awful chemical taste to it (the water inside tastes fine if my tongue doesn't touch the opening), although I'm hoping that'll fade with use. My biggest beef with this bottle is that the valve is easily compressed by accident when I sit down to do my bindings, which releases water inside my jacket - no bueno. I've started keeping the bottle inside of a quart-sized Ziploc to avoid it leaking onto me, but that's cumbersome and shouldn't be necessary. Seems like a hard flip-cap of some sort to cover the valve would solve this.

Overall, it was inexpensive enough that I'll keep using it, but I wouldn't buy another one.

I use the soft bottles in the UD vests and it is great. When they are empty they roll up and take up very little space.

Soft bottles are the way to go!!! I started using this with the Jenny Vesta - as you drink the bottle compresses down and takes up very little space.

I was stoked to see UD was making a soft bottle which could greatly reduce bounce in their vests. Despite some flaws I use them as my main bottles paired with the AK vest 1.0.



Pros:

- Significantly reduces bounce when used in a vest. With a hard sided bottle, the sloshing when it's 50-75% full can be quite a bit if you're really going fast down a hill. This bottle doesn't have any slosh by design

- The bite valve is better than the valve on the normal UD bottle in my opinion. It dispenses liquid faster and despite not having a locking mechanism I've never seen the valve leak even during travel.

- You can drink from the bottle in any orientation. You can drink from the bottle from the vest pocket without really using your hands.

- Doesn't seem to build up funk. I don't wash them often and they've never gotten smelly or moldy even with old sports drink.

- Packs up really tiny.



Cons:

- Too small. I think they could have made it a few ounces bigger while still easily fitting in the vest pockets. Sometimes it's just not enough water to make it between water sources or aid stations. My solution is to carry three body bottles: two in the front and one in the back. But then you have to awkwardly get it out later.

- The opening is too small, which makes it harder to fill up at streams but also really hard to put drink mix in without wasting any. Get a funnel or something.

- In the right conditions (gradual downhill with bottle ~50% full), it can bounce out of your vest while you're running, but I've only had this happen once.