The Essential Beach Cup
By Rachel Levy
It’s non-negotiable to have cold drinks on hand as you spend days by the shore enjoying the beach, on the waves enjoying the ocean, and anywhere else in the great outdoors your day might bring you.
In steps Hydro Flask; a brand known for their stainless steel water bottles. Not only have they expanded their collection to include coolers, tumblers and food storage, they also introduced a trade-in program for old bottles.
As someone who spends large parts of each day out of the house and in the sun, I’ve tried almost every brand of bottle you can name through the years and none holds up quite like my Hydro Flask. As a South Florida native and avid outdoorswoman, it has become my year-round (and, while traveling, climate-round) companion.
What started out as a gift quickly became more than that: having been with me everywhere from the desert in Israel and farms on Hawaii to hikes in New Hampshire and boat days out on Lake Boca, my relationship to this bottle quickly surpassed an appropriate level of human-bottle intimacy long ago. However, if you take a peek around at the Hydro Flask’s of friends and family, you’ll find that this type of bond isn’t as few and far between as you might think.
More than a bottle, Hydro Flask culture is one that takes pride in long-lasting relationships with bottles that are sturdy enough to survive drops while hiking, biking, and running (trust me, I’ve tested all three plenty of times). Look around and you’ll see stickers on the bottles of friends and family representing trips to various national and skate parks. As the years pass, these bottles become an interactive scrapbook of sorts that allows owners to interact daily with a small piece of all of the trips they’ve been on.
Though it happens rarely and really only to the most intense of adventurers, when it’s time to retire an old Hydro Flask, owners can participate in the company’s Trade-In program that makes sure these stainless steel bottles are recycled properly. After registering the product online, users can print a shipping label, apply it to the empty bottle and drop it off at any shipping location. To incentivize this recycling program, the company offers $5 off future purchases to those who participate.
This summer, turn to the one brand that can promise to keep you cool all day without forcing sacrifices to cup style or size. Feel good about it, too, knowing that when the day comes to buy a new one, there’s an opportunity to recycle the old.
