airup vs. cirkul

Last year I was in a café in a small town near Portland, Oregon, when I overheard one of the baristas tell another, "I'm on, like, a water journey right now." I thought it was hysterically funny. Little did I know, I'd be on a water journey of my own a few months later.

I drink a lot of tea and that's all well and good,  but I know I'm not drinking enough water. Enter: AirUp and Cirkul. Both claim they will encourage you, the consumer, to drink more water. They use similar, though not identical, methods of injecting flavor into water and purport the nice taste will make you drink more (with their expensive bottles, of course). During the course of my water journey, I've tried both. Here are my thoughts on them:

AirUp 

Some of my AirUp flavor pods.

The first of the two I tried was AirUp. I'd seen ads for it on YouTube and, fool that I am, I thought maybe the YouTubers were telling the truth about how great AirUp is. I excitedly ordered a stainless-steel bottle and a number of flavor pods. I'm too embarrassed to share the total cost, considering that the bottle landed in a thrift store donation box less than a month after it arrived.

Before I go any further, a quick explanation of how AirUp works might be necessary. Before I ordered it, I was under the impression that it used the smell-taste connection that makes everything taste terrible when you're congested. So, you smell the pod and it makes the water taste good. I was skeptical, but not skeptical enough to not order. Turns out the way it really works is by injecting tiny bubbles of scented air into the water as you drink. This supposedly mimics carbonation.

Clearly I didn't like AirUp, but I did try to give it a fair shake. Accordingly, here are the positives:

1. The smells! I gave the ones I ordered a smell each, and they really did smell nice. I especially liked the peach tea smell.
2. The marketing is quite convincing. Their website looks nice.
3. The bottle has a straw, so you don't have to tilt it to drink out of it, which is nice for mindlessly sipping water while sitting at a desk, or something like that.
   

That's all that I found positive about it, to be honest. Here's what I found strange, annoying, or bad:

1. The system is designed more towards small sips than gulps. I'm not a sipper of any beverage, so I found myself trying to take big gulps of water and sucking in mostly air.
2. The flavoring isn't that effective. To activate it properly, you have to push the pod down on the straw to lock into place. Unfortunately, that means that you are letting a lot of air in when you drink. See above.
3. The bottle isn't dishwasher safe. I mean, come on... it's 2025. Even Nalgene bottles are dishwasher safe!
4.  It's expensive. More than it should be.
5. Customer service is not so great. Their return policy is even worse. After trying it, I thought I might try to return the bottle since I didn't like using it and felt it was a waste of money. Unfortunately, their policy doesn't allow that. I might have been able to return some of the pods, but that didn't feel worth it to me.

Verdict: It doesn't really work as advertised — or if it does, it just isn't for me. Unless you like water full of air bubbles with vague taste to them, I wouldn't recommend AirUp.

Cirkul

My Cirkul tumbler. I don't know why the caption has so much space around it.

The next step on my water journey was Cirkul. At first, I thought Cirkul worked the same as AirUp but it turns out Cirkul is much more mysterious. Instead of injecting air into the water, Cirkul's cartriges (they call them "sips") inject ... something. To be honest, I can't find much about this on their website (or any others — it all seems like AI slop copying their marketing copy ... dead internet, hooray!). But it's not air. I suspect it's either a liquid or a powder, but I'm not going to cut a "sip" open to find out.

I started with a Cirkul bottle, which I wasn't completely satisfied with. It required tipping the bottle, and due to the design of the "sip" nozzle, I had a similar experience to AirUp, where I couldn't get as much water as I wanted. I tried one of their new tumblers shortly after, which works much better.

But the real question is: does it taste good? Yes, actually, it does. The first "sip" I tried was a blueberry one. It was quite good. The second (and current) "sip" I've tried is a lemonade one which is almost too sweet to drink. And there's the catch: Cirkul lets you adjust the amount of mysterious flavoring substance that you inject into your water, but I've found that anything below 7-8 hardly tastes like anything and anything above is overpowering. Through some experimentation, I've found that if you let the tumbler sit for a while, the flavor "fills" more and tastes stronger (in which case I always turn it down), but if you sip constantly, you have to turn up the dial to taste anything. The numbers don't really mean much.

One thing to note about Cirkul is that it includes nutrition facts that can be essentially summed up as: there is nothing in this "sip." There's essentially no sugar or other ingredients, though some "sips" contain vitamins or other additives. I wish I understood how it works that it tastes strong, but contains negligible ingredients! 

Verdict: Cirkul is fine and it works, but it may not be worth the cost. The flavors taste good! However, the "sips" are difficult to calibrate consistently. I probably would recommend it to someone with kids (for their kids) more than I'd recommend it to an adult. 

Final verdict: between Cirkul and AirUp I would strongly recommend Cirkul, however...

Surprise Third Thing

That's right! Water-flavoring packets. They still exist and you can find them at the dollar store for like $1 per pack. They're cheap, they're easy to use, and they come in flavors ranging from Skittles to Sonic Cherry Limeade to Emergen-C (if that one counts). The nutrition facts aren't that different from Cirkul, and you can easily control the amount of flavoring. The conclusion of my water journey has been realizing that there really isn't much reason to spend ridiculous amounts of money on complex water "fixing" systems when you can just dump a Crystal Light flavor packet into your bottle (or just have a cup of tea). I still have to use up all my "sips" though.