(laughter)
- (coughs)
Went right down my throat!
- So today's topic comes from
our senior food editor, Claire.
And it could leave us in a sticky situation.
- Tennessee lawmaker Kent Calfee was recently photographed
drinking out of what appeared to be
a Hershey's chocolate syrup bottle.
When questioned about the incident, Calfee explained
he was not drinking syrup, but water,
because he and his wife "like to recycle everything."
He also explained he preferred the syrup bottle
over a traditional, fancy, expensive water bottle
'cause he's just gonna lose it anyway.
I have some questions.
First of all, and this is the most important one,
will the the water not taste like chocolate syrup?
And is there another repurposed bottle
that's better to drink from?
- So three things we're looking for:
How easy it was for us to clean out the bottle.
Is there any residual taste left from the product inside?
and how easy is it to actually drink from the bottle?
You wanna pop it open? - Let's give it a shot.
- [Joel] Okay, down the hatch.
- Cheers.
Okay first off, definitely you smell chocolate.
Right away. - You can smell it.
It doesn't taste so much like chocolate, though.
- I definitely got chocolate on my lips.
- The little cap thing is kind of annoying.
'Cause it rubs up against my, you know, cheek or whatever.
- I feel like a baby goat, yeah.
And you're not getting,
I'm definitely getting, with each sip,
like a coating of chocolate syrup around my lip.
- [Abu] I'd say this was easy to clean.
Honestly, this was a five.
And again, there's not gonna be syrup in there
the second time I use this for my water bottle.
- For residual flavor I would give it a two or three.
- Wow, really!
I must have done a terrible, - Smell mine.
- Okay, wow!
- This is very chocolaty.
- Yeah, mine doesn't smell like that at all, okay yeah.
- So let's meet in the middle, let's call it a three.
- [Abu] Let's call it a three.
- Drinkability, it's easy to drink out of.
I'd give it a four. - Relatively easy.
I wanna knock a point for this cap thing.
- Yeah, let's give it a four.
If you had no receptacles and you were very thirsty
and you were in the desert and all you had
was an empty chocolate syrup bottle,
I would say hack, it works.
It is a hack. - Yeah, this would do.
Yeah, in those circumstances only.
- Mustard, here we go.
Cheers.
I got like three drops.
- Small bottle.
Like you're gonna be running back to the fountain
to refill this like every hour.
- This is really a flask.
You could put like some whiskey in here.
- Right, it doesn't have to be water.
There's actually no guarantee this is water.
Size is a huge issue here.
The bottle itself, not enough water.
The little nozzle, sippy section, not great.
- Maybe if you were like a small child
and it was child size.
Otherwise you don't get enough water in each sip.
- Cleaning was kind of a mess actually.
Mustard obviously has a thicker consistency,
so I really had to get in there
and had to rinse it multiple times
over and over and over again.
Not great to clean.
Would not recommend. - So a two?
Call it a two? - Yeah, I'd say two.
Yeah, it wasn't a total mess.
- [Joel] Residual flavor I didn't detect any, did you?
- Me neither, I'm shocked.
That's like a five.
- That's a five.
Drinkability, a one or a two.
- [Abu] Let's give it a two.
- Water did come out of it into our mouths.
- Exactly, if you squeeze and if you get your lips
perfectly on that nozzle then you'll get water.
Yeah.
But now, hack or wack?
- Using our stranded island scenario,
if I had to choose between the syrup bottle and this bottle,
I'd go syrup every time.
- Yeah.
- So wack on this one.
- Mustard's wack.
I'm a little worried about this one
because I think it's the only one that's oil based.
- Yeah.
- So I feel like cleaning and residual taste
maybe were a big issue here.
First off, even before we do this,
this has the widest opening of any of our bottles.
- And no squeezing involved here either.
You know, you can use this like a normal water bottle.
- [Both] Cheers.
- Salad dressing.
Full on salad dressing.
(coughing)
I can taste all the herbs.
But only 30 calories per serving.
- You know, I will say cleaning it was very easy.
- Did you use soap?
So what do you think, salad dressing bottle?
Hack or wack?
- I have to go wack on this
because I don't want my water to taste like salad dressing.
Oh boy.
Look at this ring.
Can you see this on camera? (laughs)
There's a ring of soy sauce here
that I couldn't get off.
- And also I think soy sauce might be like,
the strongest flavor of anything.
- Yeah.
- Then the nozzle for the soy sauce is made
so you like, shake it out.
So I don't know if it's gonna be so easy
to drink it in a gulp.
Okay, here we go. - Okay, let's give it a shot.
- Cheers.
I got a lot of soy sauce in that one.
- That's the only way to do it and get anything out of it.
- Open mouth?
- Yeah, and just squeeze in like bursts.
You can't even do like a long stream.
- Honestly, I didn't get as much taste
as I did with the salad dressing.
- Oh yeah.
- Which is shocking.
'Cause again, there's literally
I didn't clean enough soy sauce out of here.
- We can visibly see brown droplets of soy sauce.
- Drinkability was tough though.
You couldn't really squeeze it comfortably
without like, applying too much force.
The nozzle is not meant to drip water into your mouth
in any reasonable way.
Honestly, I was just getting like,
little droplets through most of it.
Drinkability, I think this is the lowest
we've had so far.
- You can't drink out of it, this is wack.
- This is the worst one we've done.
- Don't do this.
- No.
- Ever.
- Ketchup.
First of all, these ketchup bottles are upside down,
which I think is probably not ideal for storing water.
- Ergonomically horrible.
- There are drops of water coming out.
I have to say that like,
there is a distinct orange tint in my water.
- [Abu] Very much.
Think you're gonna be drinking at least
five-to-10% ketchup here.
- Let's go.
Cheers.
- Cheers.
- Ketchup bottle.
Let me know when you're ready.
- There's water everywhere.
- You can't suck the water out.
You have to... (laughs)
You have to squeeze it to like, release it into your mouth.
- And then it's a jet stream!
(laughter)
- [Joel] So I believe that the ketchup bottle has like,
the clean, like, the clean release
so that you know, you don't get like the crusty thing.
- Yes.
- So when you try to suck on this flat nozzle,
you don't get anything, no matter how hard you suck.
But then when you squeeze it a little bit,
it just like, shoots it straight out
in like, a very narrow, very forceful stream.
You know what it feels like?
You know at the eye doctor when you get the glaucoma test
and it like shoots the puff of air and you're like "ah!"
(laughter)
(coughs)
Went right down my throat!
I honestly don't ever want to drink anything ever again.
I think we agree it's wack.
So we've ranked these now from worst to best.
- Yes, ketchup bottle easily the worst.
By far, this should really, this belongs like, off camera.
Like right here.
- [Joel] These are the only two that like,
you could drink, like I would suggest,
you could drink out of if you had to.
- You could, yeah.
I don't know if I would suggest.
I wouldn't quite go that far.
- But drinking out of an empty chocolate syrup bottle,
it is a hack.
It is officially a hack.
- Hats off to you, Senator.