Klean Kanteen Insulated TKWide 16 oz Review

Being able to drink your favorite beverage in a convenient way adds a certain cherry of satisfaction on top of the cool refreshing feeling you get from the drink itself. A strawberry milkshake, but with a swirly straw? You bet you can count us in. The good news is that some insulated bottles now have a straw included in their design.

Klean Kanteen’s Insulated TKWide 16 oz is one such example. Apart from being an insulated bottle, the TKWide’s cap cleverly integrates a straw into a twist cap so you can happily sip at your drink without having to fuss with tilting the bottle. The cap design is interesting, but we also have to check out how the TKWide performs as a whole. So without further ado, let’s see how well the TKWide holds your drink.

Materials & Aesthetic

Like most insulated travel water bottles, the TKWide uses stainless steel as its base material. But from the outside, the stainless steel is only exposed at the bottom portion and on the handle. Most of the exterior is powder-coated, which gives the TKWide a nice and grippy texture that’s easy to hold onto. The trade-off is that this powder coating is somewhat prone to scuffs and scratches. Our sample here has a fairly bright color (Blue Tint) that hides these scuffs well, but they’re definitely there if you look close enough.

At the time of writing this review, the TKWide is available in three colors: Shale Black, Blue Tint, and Purple Potion. We can’t comment on how the other two colors will handle scratches and imperfections, and we can only confirm that our brightly colored sample did so nicely. The TKWide’s aesthetic gets a neat two-tone look for each color. Purple Potion gets black accents, Blue Tint gets light beige, while Shale Black is complemented only by exposed stainless steel at the bottom. Branding is also kept to a minimum of two: one near the bottom and one on the cap.

Apart from the powder coating and stainless steel, silicone also plays a part in the TKWide. Underneath the twist cap is a built-in pop-up straw. It’s the TKWide’s hidden trick which we appreciated throughout the testing period.

Usage

But before we get to the sippy straw and how it works, some other interesting design choices are going on in the TKWide. One of these is the way the cap threads into the main body. Open up the TKWide’s cap, and you’ll find that the threading is internal, as opposed to external, as you would find on typical plastic water or soda bottles. The benefit of going with an internal thread design is that you don’t feel the thread if you drink from the bottle directly. However, in the case of the TKWide, Klean Kanteen went a step further.

Instead of a typical thread design that uses a strip spiral, Klean Kanteen uses bead-like protrusions. It achieves the same effect as a strip, but Klean Kanteen claims that this also forms a better seal for increased thermal performance. We can’t say for sure whether or not this design helps your drink stay cold or hot for longer, but we can say that the TKWide was the least effective in this regard in our roundup of insulated bottles.

Despite placing last in terms of thermal performance, the TKWide still gets us through our typical workday with relative ease. Our cold water remained at a temperature that we were more than comfortable calling “cold,” which also applied when we used it for coffee. Overall, the TKWide isn’t the best performance-wise, but it still gets the job done.

Unfortunately, the TKWide’s small capacity relative to its size means that we got through our usual fill of water faster than a comparable bottle. For example, the 16-ounce TKWide shares a similar size to an 18-ounce YETI Rambler or Hydro Flask but with two ounces less capacity. So in practice, we were going through refills too quickly for our drink to lose its original temperature.

Where the TKWide begins to really flex its features is on its cap. The first noteworthy feature here is the stainless steel handle, which folds down to either side where it’s out of the way when it’s not in use—having the handle not fixed in place or protruding shaves off an extra inch or two. That doesn’t sound like much, but it might be the difference between being able to pack an extra sandwich in your lunch bag or not.

Twist the cap open, and the built-in straw pops up. As mentioned previously, the portion where you drink from is made out of silicone. Throughout the testing period, there were instances when the straw got stuck inside the cap. We can easily pop it out with our finger, though that isn’t very sanitary, nor is it convenient. This small issue went away when we cleaned and reassembled the cap, which is easy to do, as we’ll discuss later on.

Underneath the cap, the straw is extended via another metal straw. This makes drinking cold beverages easy because you don’t have to tilt the bottle upwards. However, it’s worth noting that Klean Kanteen doesn’t recommend drinking hot beverages with the metal straw attached. Hot drinks aren’t typically consumed using a straw, but more importantly, very hot drinks might damage it.

Taking the TKWide’s cap apart for cleaning is fairly straightforward. Simply undo the cap and pull out the lock piece from the side. Once this piece is removed, the topmost portion of the cap (the part that twists and hides the silicone straw) can be lifted off. Detaching the metal straw underneath is as easy as pulling it off the silicone portion.

From here, most of the cap is already exposed and ready for a deep clean. The silicone portion of the straw is also technically removable, but we weren’t able to remove ours since it’s attached very tightly. You can still clean it while it’s attached; just pay special attention to the outer edges to make sure grime doesn’t form around it.

One small detail we noticed while testing the cap is how well the straw seals. When we removed the cap with the twist cap closed (i.e., with the silicone straw tucked away), there’s a substantial amount of liquid trapped inside the metal straw. Of course, it’s not quite an airtight vacuum seal as some of the liquid slowly drips down, but we’re glad to see that the twist cap forms such a tight seal because that means we have to worry less about leaks.

As an insulated bottle, the TKWide performs at an acceptable level, holding our drinks’ temperature throughout the day, though it must be said that the relatively small capacity and the rate at which we empty it might have something to do with that. But the star of the show is the well-designed cap, which made drinking from the TKWide a breeze. Apart from the hard-to-remove silicone straw, the cap is user-friendly and provides the added benefit of a straw without it getting in the way when not in use.