If you somehow don't know, a Nalgene bottle is an inexpensive single-walled plastic drinking bottle. While there are a few variations, they are most commonly seen in a 1 liter / 33 oz. size with a wide mouth. All of these things make it a fine drink bottle, but also make it less than ideal beyond that.
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Let's start with the plastic, single-wall construction. While this makes the bottle inexpensive and lightweight, it also means that it doesn't handle heat at all. Purifying water with heat or flame isn't possible, and even trying to drink a hot beverage from it can burn your hands. This means that filtration or chemical purification is required, and it's only useful for holding cold drinks (great in the summer, not so much in the winter).
The gigantic mouth makes it easy to fill the bottle with water and ice, but also makes drinking on the move a very sloppy affair. Additionally, this leads to the biggest fallacy of the Nalgene bottle: the concept of the Water Bottle Survival Kit. With a very wide mouth and lots of space inside, a Nalgene bottle seems like an ideal way to carry all sorts of survival gear. First aid kits, fire kits, a spare knife, a space blanket; they all fit in the bottle with room to spare. The rigid material also protects the contents from damage, and that's great.
However, a problem arises when you need a water bottle and you've got all this great gear standing between you and the ability to carry a drink. But if you empty the bottle to fill it with water, where do you put all the loose hardware you had to dump out? Like so many other prepping notions, this is great in theory but bad in practice.
Don't read any of this as a general indictment. I have several Nalgene bottles and clones, and they're great in their intended work space. I frequently carry one at work, and always have one handy in the house; I drink a lot of water, and they're a great mix of easy to keep with me and large enough I'm not constantly filling it. Beyond that, however, is where their performance starts to fall off and where I start looking for other bottles to carry my water.
Now that I've put arguably the most popular water bottle in the free world on blast, where do we go from here? If you don't get a Nalgene, what should you be getting? In my opinion, water bottles are a pretty personal item. Instead of telling you what to buy, I'll lay out some considerations and then I'll tell you what I use.
If you're going to heat or boil water in it, your only real option is a single-wall metal bottle, because the insulating nature of a double wall bottle will prevent heating, and a plastic bottle will just melt. You'll want something either uncoated, or with a heat-resistant finish, possibly anodized or enameled. You should do a test boil in your bottle to make sure that the coating won't burn or melt off before you use it in the real world.
With that said, my preference is for a double-walled metal bottle and a separate pot to boil my water in. I know my pot is safe to heat water in it, since it's intended for exactly that. It also has a wide opening, making it very easy to pour water into and out of it. I can see when it's boiling, or use a Water Pasteurization Indicator. The insulated bottle prevents burning my hands and keeps warm drinks warm if I need them to be.
Make your choices based on your needs, test your gear, and be safe.
Stay hydrated, my friends.
Lokidude
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