Fill, Drink, Repeat: LifeStraw Go Review

The LifeStraw Go bottle carries and filters your water. Fill it up in a stream and drink with confidence.

Back in the day, water bottles led a simple life. Its raison d’etre was uncomplicated: Carry fluids; nothing more, nothing less. Everything made sense.

How times have changed.

Just as technology transformed the humble wristwatch into a super-techy, wearable device capable of tracking every snore, fart, and step you take, so too has it impacted the portable hydration market. What was once merely a thing that held your H2O now sports unique and essential features as part of your outdoor kit.

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Meet the LifeStraw Go

The LifeStraw Go is a refillable water bottle that uses a two-stage filtration process to make water safe to drink. The brand claims it removes 99.9999-percent of bacteria and parasites. It is not intended to remove viruses, so if that’s a concern in your region, look elsewhere.

The colorful bottle combines the original LifeStraw – a straw-style filter that makes contaminated water safe to drink – with a replaceable carbon capsule to get rid of rubbish stuff like bad smells.

According to the brand, the carbon capsule will last for up to three months of consistent use, which amounts to around 26 gallons of water. Replacement capsules are available online for about $16 a pair.

The bottle itself holds 650ml (about 21 ounces) of water. But you shouldn’t need to worry about running out of fluids anyway, as this is a refillable gadget. As a Scot, I dig a free refill.

LifeStraw Go: Field Test

We used the LifeStraw Go on a weekend hiking trip to the Aosta Valley in Italy last September. This turned out to be the perfect proving ground.

We followed a section of the Tour des Geants – the legendary multi-day mountain running event that takes place every year in the Aosta Valley. The terrain was demanding, and long, hot days working hard high up in the hills made hydration a priority.

As it was late season, some of the high-alpine refuges (European for “huts”) closed for summer, so we had no choice but to use the streams and mountain lakes along the trail.

Not having to worry about the quality of the water in our water bottles was pretty liberating. It took all the stress out of the situation and left us free to drink as much as we wanted. We felt safe knowing that we were able to fill the bottles back up.

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And let’s be honest, the more hydrated we were during the day, the easier it was to wash down our work with vast quantities of prosecco and vino rosso in the refuges in the evening.

LifeStraw Go: Simple Water Filtration

The Lifestraw Go is good for any wilderness adventure as long as you’re carrying a reasonable-sized daypack and surface water is plentiful. If you’re heading out on an uber-light mission with a race vest, then you’ll be looking for something with a little less volume, probably a collapsible, soft water bottle.

It’s also important to note this bottle is designed to filter drinking water. You suck water through the straw. So, if you want to filter water for use in drink mixes or cooking without boiling, look to other options that force water through a filter and into a storage vessel.

But for most day/weekend backcountry missions, the LifeStraw Go more than does the job. If it could only transform water into wine, it would be absolute perfection. Here’s to hoping.