Wednesday, 17 June 2020 08:49

Snow Peak Kanpai Bottle tested and reviewed

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Insulated bottles come in all sorts of shapes and sizes as reusable bottles and flasks have become an important tool in cutting down plastic pollution.

At £90 the Snow Peak Kanpai (500ml) is far from the cheapest option, but the brand has a reputation for excellence when it comes to build quality and durability. To date this is also the only flask or bottle of its type we've seen that comes with a choice of lids.

What Snow Peak say:

Snow Peak's popular stainless steel Kanpai bottle is a double-walled, vacuum-sealed container designed to keep drinks hot or cold for more than six hours. It can store a whole 500ml canned drink inside.

Features:

  • Material          Bottle:18-8 Stainless Steel, Lids: Polypropylene (BPA Free)
  •  Weight:          Bottle:230g, Lids: Hot - 41g, Cold - 90g, Drinking - 38g
  • Dimensions:  7.7 cm x 7.7 cm x 21.6 cm (With Hot Lid or Cold Lid on), 7.7 cm x 7.7 cm x 22.2 cm (With Drinking Lid on)
  •  Capacity:       500ml
  •  Made in:         Japan

 Snow Peak Kanpai on test:

When it comes to testing bottles and flasks there's not a lot you can do to differentiate between them. You put your liquid (usually) in, put the lid on and see how long the contents are kept hot or cold. With the modern double-walled flask the rsults are pretty much the same from one brand to another and only really differtiated by the brand's logo and the size. At £90, however, the Snow Peak Kanpai has to have a bit more than a logo to justify the price.

What you get with a Kanpai is a really well engineered flask (though they call it a bottle) with 3 seperate lids; 1 for hot contents, 1 for cold and one for drinking from.

The capacity is quoted as 500ml  but in our tests it took exactly 600ml to the start of the thread for attaching the lid. This extra capacity is reflected in the Kanpai's height compared to the majority of insulated flasks. 

 Snow peak kanpai 2 cold

Snow Peak Kanpai with cold lid

 The cold lid is white and the hot lid is black, to avoid confusion, and the cold lid has a warning on the inside to avoid using with hot contents. With the 600ml capacity and a good diameter the Kanpai can easily accommodate a 330 or 500ml can and in tests where we left a chilled can inside and placed the flask in direct sunlight in the garden it was still chilled after 8 hours. 

Snow peak kanpai 4

For the hot test we used the black lid, which is noticeably lighter in weight than the cold lid. Interestingly with no drinking hole on the lid the Kanpai marginally outperformed the other flasks in our collection in reatining heat. A coffee left out in the flask all day was still a good drinking temperature after 10 hours.

Snow peak kanpai 2 hot

Snow Peak Kanpai with hot lid

The drinking lid is, quite simply, the best drinking lid we've come across. Where other brands use click up/down lids most often Snow Peak have opted for a sliding closure with a finger hole to enable easy opening and closing. In addition to having a larger than average size hole with the slide set to open you don't have the issue of accidentally not fully closing a push up/down lid or the slow loosening of the fit with repeated opening and closing.

Snow peak kanpai drink

Snow Peak Kanpai with drinks lid

It terms of temperature maintenance the Snow Peak Kanpai is up there with the best performers, although the differences at this level are minimal. The large opening and capacity make it perfectly suitable for hot foods as well as drinks, and in a bit of sideways thinking we even managed to keep a 6 pack of sausages frozen for the day with a few ice cubes and the cold lid. 

At over 20cm high it's not going to be a coffee shop alternative to plastic but the hot and cold lid options mark it out as a flask for travellers. Like most Snow Peak products it looks good and the build quality is faultless. The big test, of course, is how well it lasts; will the drinking lid closure stay leak proof over months of use, will the outer wall remain dent free given how easily it can be depressed (and springs back). At £90 you'd hope so; you're paying a premium for the brand name but that premium is based on design quality over years.

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