Hydro Flask 24 oz Wide Mouth Travel Bottle with Flex Straw Cap Review

Shopping around for travel bottles can often feel like a numbers exercise: decide how much drink you need and pick the bottle with the best value. Honestly, that’s an entirely valid approach if you want an objective way to do so. However, bottles like the Hydro Flask 24 oz Wide Mouth Travel Bottle highlight at least one other aspect you should consider: shape.

With its distinctly bulbous midsection and tapered bottom, the design plays around with the bottle’s capacity. To what end? From our testing, this shape is really cup holder-friendly and, in some cases, easier to fit and travel with. So, let’s dive in and see how exactly that works.

The Rundown

In terms of construction, the Wide Mouth Travel Bottle doesn’t stray from the rest of Hydro Flask’s lineup. The body is made of durable stainless steel, which is almost a must for insulated bottles like this, while the inside has TempShield double-wall vacuum insulation. It’s BPA-free for your peace of mind and dishwasher-safe for convenience. Cold and hot drinks are supported, depending on your cap. The Flex Straw Cap we’re testing this bottle with isn’t designed for hot beverages, so just keep that in mind.

On that note, a great thing about Hydro Flask bottles is their wide range of cap designs for different use cases. We picked the Flex Straw Cap since we like not having to tilt the bottle back just to take a swig. That said, there’s also the Flex Chug Cap and regular Flex Cap if you prefer to take big swigs from a large opening. For those who want to enjoy their coffee and hot chocolate with teeny little sips, there’s also the Flex Sip Lid. All of these caps come with foldable handles, so you’re not compromising carry comfort by choosing any one of them. All in all, it’s a sufficiently wide variety for different types of travelers.

As for the Flex Straw Cap itself, it features a flip-up spout with a fairly sizable tab sticking out to help you lever it out of the flush surface. There are no fancy spring-loaded mechanisms, buttons, or locks going on here; just flip the spout, allowing it to connect to the straw on the underside of the cap. While there is no intricate mechanism to lock the spout in place, it does snap securely into the cap once you push it flush against it. Snapping it shut feels somewhat lacking in terms of tactile feel, so you’ll have to make sure it actually engages before you throw the bottle into your bag’s pocket.

The bottle’s shape may not look like a relevant factor, but it is in at least two ways. Firstly, this bottle is noticeably stout compared to other 24-ounce bottles, and you’ll see the difference more clearly once we get to the last section. In essence, a lot of its volume is concentrated around the midsection, as evidenced by how prominent and soda-can-like it is. By comparison, the bottle’s bottom end is quite petite and cup-like.

Using the bottle is similar to any Hydro Flask insulated bottle. Cold drinks stay cold, and hot drinks stay hot for the day, provided you put them in with lots of ice or piping hot, of course. Meanwhile, actually drinking from the bottle is generally a convenient experience. It is easy to hold, whether gripping the wide section with larger hands or using the bottom with smaller hands.

If there’s anything to complain about, it’s that the volume of water you sip out of the straw feels too much for us. That being said, we are coming from testing Owala FreeSip bottles, and it may just be the case that we’ve grown too used to their narrow straws.

Packability

The other way the bottle’s shape is relevant is how it affects packability. Due to the bottle’s stoutness, it’s very easy to slot into deep water bottle pockets (usually made of elastic and stretchy mesh). It tends to sink all the way to the neck, where there’s a slight divot for the pocket’s elastic to grip into. The tradeoff is that the bottle doesn’t sit quite securely on smaller, shallower water bottle pockets since the mesh can’t grip the body where it tapers towards the bottom.

Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention how most cup holders easily accommodate this tapered cup-like shape. Sure, some cars in America have Big Gulp-certified cup holders, but this is a suitable bottle to partner with if your car doesn’t.

Quick Comparison

As you can see, Hydro Flask’s other insulated bottles with the same capacity are visibly taller than the Wide Mouth Travel Bottle. These are the regular Hydro Flask Standard and Wide Mouth bottles, notably lacking the “Travel” designation in their name. Apart from the shape, though, all three bottles function similarly in terms of keeping drinks hot or cold and how easy they are to drink from. And yes, you can swap out the caps of these two bottles, as well.

These two bottles’ uniform shapes are more suitable for shallower water bottle pockets. Their more slender profile puts less tension on a pocket’s stretchy mesh, which means they still don’t sit quite securely inside shallow water bottle pockets. However, they’re still more secure than the tapered Wide Mouth Travel Bottle.