… and other end crenelated.
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Now that I think of it, this may have been my unconscious reason for switching from drinking my yerba mate with a stainless bombilla to instead preparing and drinking it as you would with tea.
My issue with reusable straws has always been with the cleaning. How do you clean the sticky soda or juice from the inside?
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Oops! Thanks. Fixed.
Also:
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Interesting. I use stainless steel straws and hadn’t noticed a taste difference.
My partner however isn’t a fan, she bangs her teeth on them, so instead she uses some reusable silicone straws instead.
Neither of these options are particularly good for travelling with though, so it’s nice to see folks thinking about that element.
Personally, I just try to not use straws where possible (glasses in restaurants don’t need straws!) but it’d be nice to have something like this for when I’m drinking out of a fast food cup or equivalent.
Related:
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How about for drinking high-acidity beverages like orange juice?
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I actually went and literally tested this for you just now. I don’t personally drink OJ regularly, but we do have it in the house.
- Poured some, drank, reflected on flavour.
- Drank water (from different glass!)
- inserted stainless steel straw into OJ glass, drank, reflected on flavour
Didn’t really notice a difference. YMMV, perhaps we needed to add either 1) time or 2) temperature to get a reaction? Dunno.
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Yay for scientific method!
Maybe it depends on the alloy. I haven’t used a stainless steel straw but I have experienced the “metallicy” taste drinking beverages out of metal containers.
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My wife has a thing for straws so we have a box of straws at the house. Compostable straws. They get washed till they are too beat up then they go in with the compost and become worm food etc. They don’t cost $20-$30, it’s no big deal if they break, and they can be tossed in a purse/bag pretty easy too.
Since municipal composting came to town (Minneapolis) my household waste stream has become primarily recycling and compost. We downsized our trash bin to the smallest one and could probably get away with only putting it out once a month if we wanted.
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I have been looking at this, and thinking about it, and I have to agree with others here that the joints are problematic. The smallest hole, and it no longer functions.
They have a “squeegee” which is used to clean it, but it would need to be rinsed and dried, otherwise beverage remnants would get into the seams and the plastic case. If the beverages included any sugars, the whole thing becomes a bacteria farm.
Snowpeak makes a much cheaper titanium straw, which will last 1000 years. If you needed it to be smaller, you could pretty easily make hollow threaded sections that screw together.
Or, someone could make a more durable plastic straw for about three cents each. There is nothing really keeping us from washing and reusing regular straws, except their lack of durability.We have plenty of plastic straws in our cutlery drawer that came with drinks, and were washed to be reused. I carry one of the Snowpeak ones. I use it when traveling, to drink bottled drinks that may have been stored in sketchy conditions.
In my experience, metals will affect the taste of acidic drinks, but only if left in contact for a long time. In some cases, it can have an antiseptic effect.
What kind of blow darts fit it?
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There are exactly two drinks that I find require straws:
a) milkshakes (and especially thickshakes)
ii) bubble tea
Otherwise I hate using straws. This “cleverly named, cleverly engineered reusable drinking straw that folds down into a package small enough to use as a keyfob” would be useless for both drinks - you’d either have milk residue going funky, or the bubbles wouldn’t go through it.
Edit: there’s one other use case - those little bendy straws that come attached to cartons of juice. I’d prefer they weren’t there but there’s not much I can do about the straw existing other than not buy the juice carton, and drinking from those cartons without using a straw is … problematic.
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A $20 straw might appeal to the designer garden hose crowd.
Paper straws supplied by the restaurant seem a lot more sanitary and no more costly than plastic.
And I’m never thrilled about crowdfund campaigns that don’t check their source data.
One FinalStraw can save 584 plastic straws from entering our oceans and landfills every year.
I guess if you’re buying an iced Starbucks and going out to lunch every day, you can afford to pay $20 for a straw, or something.
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Funny enough, I actually prefer most drinks straight from the cup/container anyway, preferably one of glass. Sodas, for example, taste distinctly better to me this way. I am, however, fond of using straws with milkshakes; go figure… shrug
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This is a really dumb idea. Not only will it leak as others have pointed out, Starbucks found out why it’s a bad idea: http://fortune.com/2016/08/03/starbucks-straw-recall-lacerations/
It isn’t necessarily a bad idea. It should maybe have age guidelines.
How about a piece of plastic hose?
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Really, I need to carry around a straw? Also, America uses 500mil plastic straws per day? That means that every single American (including babies and people at the other end of life) are using 1.5 straws PER DAY? Everyone, every day? Or maybe some Americans really use a lot of straws every day? 500 million straws per day seems a lot higher than I would estimate unless I’m seriously out of touch with how much Americans consume fast food beverages.
Edit: I found quite a few references online to this 500 million per day number. Wow, I must be really out of touch with American fast beverage consumption habits.
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Makes me wonder if you could go really upmarket, and give it some capability for filtering and purifying water. With energy storage being what it is these days, a pocket water boiler isn’t out of the question. Maybe give it a heat transfer circuit to cool and output and pre-heat the input.
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