In 2008 I read this article https://www.wired.com/2008/10/bottle-shock-4/ by, I believe, @dannydoom and @adriennemso .

This was in the BPA-will-kill-you era and Siggs were THE water bottle to have - esp in Brooklyn. Kidding (kinda).

Anyway....

The Bilt bottle was the way I was going to go. I wasn't fond of stopping all the time to buy coffee (and the associated waste - both fiscal and environmental) so the wide mouth sold me. Esp when I realized I could use my pourover directly on it & use full size ice cubes for water

I bought it in Nov 2008 from REI for about $9 (I had a discount code).

I used that bottle up until about 2.5 years ago when it developed a crack in the rim that would drip when I tried to drink from it.

So, how did it hold up?

Obviously it was fantastic. I loved the almost brutalistic look to it. It was never uglier than it was at the outset so it wasn't going to have paint rub off, fall out of design trend, etc.

It was massive - I think it held around 700 or 750 ml but still easily transportable.

The wide mouth let me a) even use it for soups, etc. b) clean it more effectively than a Sigg or anything w/ a small mouth c) more forgiving of being filled from a water fntn w/ iffy pressure. Lots of other perks too

I can't tell you the number of times it sustained a fall and

didn't burst open. Each time I fully expected to be cleaning up a fifth of ice cold water from the floor of Penn Station. Each time it held up.

The wide loop in the cap allowed for all manner of tether / carabiner, etc.

When it did develop a leak I contacted the folks @GSIOutdoors (which had acquired a company that had acquired Bilt) to see if they'd honor the warranty. Within about a week of being in touch I had a new one with some bonus accessories.

It was the larger cousin though (1L I think) since it seems that particular product had been sunsetted (2 ts? 1t?) so it's relegated to water use (the kids began to ask why the water had coffee flavor so I began keeping water and coffee exclusive bottles).

(I do have a double-walled @SIGGofficial that I use for coffee, though that line has also been discont'd).

That $9 purchase - initiated from a single article I read in @wired 12 years ago - easily saved

hundreds of paper cups and plastic lids and water bottles from making their way into the system and is by far one of the best purchases I've ever made.

I've separated the rim and lid from the metal and dropped both in my recycling (yay recyclable materials)!

There's no real _point_ to this thread, esp as the world burns around us. But I just happened to recall the process in buying this bottle (notwithstanding the aesthetics) and sometimes, even if it's just for the exercise on a very small scale it's good to recall how you got to

a particular place and consider how a random leap of faith panned out from over a decade earlier.