You can’t ride a bike very far for very long without having to take a drink. That’s why cyclists carry water bottles in cages bolted to their bikes’ frame tubes. But this can be a problem when temperatures dip below the freezing mark. The cold air streaming over the bottles as you ride quickly turns the water into…you guessed it…ice. Then, when you grab a bottle for a quick drink, you find yourself frozen out—if you’re lucky, that is. If you’re not, you can chip a tooth on the icy poppet. (The poppet is that nipple-like valve on most cycling water bottles.) Even if the water hasn’t yet frozen solid, the sugarless Slush Puppie that oozes out of an ice-cold bottle can come as painful surprise.

Chilling scenario, eh? And it’s not just a winter thing. Around here, freezing mornings persist well into May, and while it doesn’t often get cold enough to turn water bottles into solid blocks of ice once the spring equinox has come and gone, poppets can (and do) keep freezing. Solutions to this problem abound, but none is entirely satisfactory. The simplest? Turn your bottles upside down in their cages. Since water freezes from the top down (ice floats, right?), the poppet will be spared till last. There’s a problem, though: Few poppets are truly watertight. Most start to drip just as soon as you invert the bottle, and an empty water bottle is even less use to a thirsty cyclist than a block of ice.

No other quick fix works very well, either. Warm water often freezes faster than cold (the Mpemba effect), so filling your bottles with hot water won’t help much. And none of the insulated poly bottles I’ve tried has worked worth a damn. A stainless steel “bullet” thermos will keep water from freezing for hours, however. But it holds much less than a standard water bottle, and it’s hard to drink from without stopping. It also rattles. Wrapping the thermos in an old wool sock stops the noise, but it makes drinking on the move even harder. Still, the contents stay liquid. That’s something. In fact, I often fill the thermos with hot, black coffee. I can’t drink this on the move either—at least I can’t do so without burning my tongue—but it makes a welcome respite when I stop to thaw out frozen fingers.

I suppose an insulated Camelbak-type hydration bladder might be the best answer to the problem, but it doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t like wearing a backpack of any kind when I’m riding, and anyway I think I’d still have trouble with frozen poppets. So I’ll stick with what I have, even if it does leave a lot to be desired. In other words, I’ll just chill out with hot coffee from my thermos till warmer weather arrives. The season of hard water can’t last forever, after all.

Or can it?

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