Rocky Gravol

To remove the plastic taste from old water bottles,
we would put in a half a cup of baking soda, fill with water,
then let sit overnight. The bad taste would be gone the next day.

This trick also works to remove the taste of the bleach that was used,
to remove the mildew from when we forgot to rinse out the Gatorade.


And a reminder, never, ever, repeat never, ever,
put Gatorade in a Camelback.

crystonwaston33

I used to drink NOS during my school time. Its taste was awesome at that time. Currently I am using glass bottles instead of this. You can also try this.

ksryder

Please tell me the sequence of events that led you to this archived thread.

Stormsedge

tiger1964 

I do this every day, wouldn't mind a new bottle if I saw one I liked, you can almost make out the Campagnolo logo on mine although most of it has worn off.

That said, my brother got out of the Navy in 1967 and dragged out his road bike from storage, I grabbed the bottle and drank the 4 year old water out of it before he could stop me (I was 11 years old at the time). Not dead yet...

tiger1964 

There blue one is a Bug, not a Ferrari, eh?

malcala622 

Im more concerned drinking from the old tin water vottles bot the plastic ones,

CliffordK

NOPE.

Too many better new bottles to worry about the old ones.

If you do decide to use one, make sure you refill it before every ride, don't drink week old water out of the bottle.

Cyclist0108

Fill them with NOS water.

CliffordK

It depends on how deep your well is.

Like the old water bottles... My spring that has fresh water tastes much better than the old mineral laden well water.

Cyclist0108

My well is fed by an underground stream.

Chombi1 

I don't think there's any problems with any plastic drinking bottles produced outside of the US as I think they have to pass FDA scrutiny before they are allowed to be imported into the country....

Bikerider007

I still drink out of a hose when doing yardwork, can't be worse than that as they bake in the sun all day. Been doing since the 70s. And just use city water; the chlorine, fluoride etc will make it all good.

crystonwaston33

One of mine best friend suggested me glass bottle. The glass bottles available in various designs and I am really impressed with its design, after that I start using that bottles.

tkamd73 

davester

Many of us were in fact poisoned by both of those things. Lead in particular had permanent neurological effects (lowered IQ, increased aggressiveness) on children that grew up near highways or who were exposed to weathering lead-based paint. There is strong evidence that the long term drops in crime rates in various countries since the 1980s tracks closely to phase-out of lead in gasoline and paint. Similar hard evidence is present for second-hand smoke.

As to water bottles, I'd drink out of them as long as I refreshed the water before each ride and they didn't taste funny. There's likely insufficient time to cause much of a toxicity exposure problem if you're just using them occasionally.

sloar 

Giacomo 1 

HaHa! Now that brings back some not-so-good memories! We ate 30 year old K Rats out of steel cans (thank goodness for MRE's!) and then washed it down with some seriously funky water out of a plastic canteen that was issued to us from God knows where, and yet we live!!!

Yeah, I would have no problem drinking out of an older water bottle

Chombi1 

Only canteens I drank from were the old round aluminum ones we had in Cub and Boy Scouts....
I think they were left over stock from the 2nd and Korean wars.....
Raw aluminum that did not have any coatings in their interiors, so the water in them had a horrible metallic taste that I'm sure wasn't good for our brains..... I imagine all the Einstein geniuses that could have been??!!

RobbieTunes

70 responses to a post about drinking from old water bottles.

I have used canteens from aluminum to plastic, and the backpacks, etc. I don't like any of them.

This from a man whose past dysentery has a lifetime effect.

Buy good bottles. Rinse them with boiling water. Keep them clean. There is no other protocol.

I still hedge that on occasion, such as borrowing water bottles when I forget. I can't undo the damage to my colon done by dysentery, but I try to prevent more.

GI coffee is perhaps the worst coffee ever produced, but it's boiled, and that, folks, makes a difference.

You put warm water in a PCB or old bottle, plastic impregnated with who knows what from decades ago, and you are inviting aliens into your body. Most won't hurt you. However.....

Olympianrider

Holy cow, this is funny. I notice that the original posting came four years ago, so I imagine that Frenchosa has come to some sort of decision in this time. But there is a coincidence here. Before this season started, I bought a vintage Raleigh water-bottle cage, with two vintage bottles that are probably exactly the same as the ones mentioned here.

They came in the original NOS package, never-used, along with the cage. This is a handlebar mount cage, with room for two bottles.

It's the ideal solution for my '70s-vintage steel-frame bike, which does not have braze-ons for water bottle mounts. You of course need a headlight, too. But I've mounted the headlight on the front fender, which gives me room for both.

Now, when the season started, I didn't give a second thought to using the plastic water bottles. I mean, they'd never been used! Of course I used them.

Jeez, hope I don't get cancer!

But say, there is one other thing about these original bottles. They don't fit snugly in the cage, and they actually rattle around a bit. I found that I could use an old sock as a sleeve and get them in there tightly. Hmm. Maybe I'll have to look up modern repro bottles, and hopefully find something that doesn't rattle around. (Which is probably a better excuse for new bottles than concerns bout cancer. I mean, heck, there's no plastic taste. They work fine!)

Erik Smith
Olympia, WA

ollo_ollo

Still have a 70's Motobecane water bottle somewhere, mount it on my bike for pics sometimes, but haven't drunk from it since maybe the 90's. Believe its water always had that same plas-t-icky taste we all remember. Don

Salamandrine 

I stumbled into those about a year ago. The Camelbak bottles are my favorite because of the valve. Good flow as you stay, and you can simply flick them open since they have no stupid bite valve. I always hated those. Functionally they remind me of the old Italian made REG, Mariplast and ALE water bottles I used to use. Usually I just leave the valve open when I'm riding. The main downside is that they are ugly. I have the CA state flag version which isn't too bad.

Apparently I'm the only person that preferred the old small cap water bottles. I guess the big cap of modern bottles is so you can add ice? Geeze. Are we all wimps now? Nothing like a warm gulp of 105 degree water on a summer's day.

Always hated Specialized bottles. Besides the low flow bite valve that I could easily bite right off, they always tasted much more plasticky than REG or ALE or TA.

wphamilton

44 years old, how much confidence do you have in the environment those plastic bottles have been stored in? Do you think they're as good as some modern plastic bottles having a claimed shelf life of 50 years? I wouldn't risk it.

Chombi1 

Will some company just make C&V plastic bottle replicas using modern materials with all the different bike and component brand logos we all look for?? It will give this thread a happy ending, plus maybe finally end the sale of unsafe old bottles in places like eBay for ridiculous prices (up to 100 bucks!) for "NOS" bottles.... There are lots of Aluminum replica bottles being sold already with all sorts of bike and component company logos on them, why is it taking so long for anyone to follow up with plastic bottle replicas?
And please make them in "regular" 550 - 600ml size too.....