Vincero Design’s new Stratus water bottles use a grooved design and strong magnetic mount to hold their water bottles to your bike. Not only does this provide an aesthetically clean way to carry some hydration, but the bottles use a similar spout to the admittedly awesome Camelbak bottles, so drinking from them is quick and easy with no butt slap to close the valve. They have wide mouth openings, too, so filling them with ice is easy…which is good, because while they say they’re working on it, there’s no insulated version yet.
Available in 20oz and 24oz (tested) traditional bottles, they also have an aero bottle coming soon. Building on the positives, they’re 100% free of BPA, DEHA and DEHP, dishwasher safe and flavorless. Can you tell we liked it?
Check after the break for pics and details and to see how super-clean the mount looks on a bike in lieu of those unsightly bottle cages…
The Stratus bottles have to be used with their Edge16 magnetic mount. Perhaps the only downside (besides no insulated version) is that as long as you have their mount on your bike, you’re limited to using their bottles…which means you have to keep them clean or buy a bunch of them.
The 24oz bottle is $9.95 and the mount is about $37 when purchased with a bottle. Seems steep given its size, but when you compare that to ultra light bottle cages, it’s a bargain. And it’s ultra light:
Without the included bolts, it’s just 18g. With them, which are non-magnetic and recommended to be used, it’s just 21g.
The carbon weave is printed on, but it darn near matches my road bike perfectly! You could probably paint it to match any bike. One more slight downside is that the screw holes don’t have elongated slots to allow for disparity between the bolt holes in the frame. On mine, I had to angle one of them ever so slightly, which poses the risk of breaking it loose within the frame…which would be a pretty big problem.
The spout didn’t leak on our test rides, but was easy to use and a bit smaller than the Camelbak’s spout (although you can hack that one to make it smaller and lighter). There’s no physical shut off valve to close it, but when I shook it lightly upside down, nothing dripped out.
Mini Review: Works great, looks good and takes all of two tries to get used to slotting the bottle onto the mount when riding. The motion is very similar to sliding a bottle into a cage, and the raised logo on the bottle provides a tactile reference point to guide your efforts. And throughout our tests, we didn’t follow the lawyer’s recommended warning at the bottom of the packaging and no one was hurt.
Note the comment on mounting (second section). Really, the only improvement we’d recommend is making an elongated slot on one of the mounting holes to accommodate any bike.
This also makes a great conversation piece, if that’s your thing.
