How to Use a Protein Shaker Bottle

An easy-to-clean protein shaker bottle provides a healthy way to mix protein drinks on-the-go. The shaker consists of a cup or bottle with tight-sealing lid, often with a drinking spout.

The most important feature is the mixer, spokes that sit inside the shaker, or a device in the lid. The mixer helps combine protein powder — such as whey, as described by Mayo Clinic — in with liquid and break up lumps to create a smooth drink. Choose a shaker that's easy to disassemble and clean to avoid the risk of bacteria build-up in inaccessible crannies.

Step 1: Add Your Liquid

Add the desired liquid. The protein shaker usually has measurement marks on the side. For example, pour 16 ounces of water, juice, dairy milk or almond milk into the protein shaker. Add the liquid before you add the protein powder to keep the powder from clumping on the bottom of the shaker or coating the sides.
Step 2: Measure Your Powder

Measure the protein powder. Packaged protein powder comes with a scoop for measuring one serving of the powder. If you don't see the scoop, reach to the bottom of the powder. If you buy protein powder in bulk, use 2 tablespoons.

Step 3: Add Other Ingredients

Add any other ingredients. A protein shaker offers a convenient way to take powdered nutritional supplements. Check with your doctor about supplements and don't exceed recommended doses.

Step 4: Cap It and Shake

Put the lid on the shaker. Make sure it snaps in place, so that it's sealed. This prevents the lid from coming off during shaking. Shake the protein shaker vigorously up and down for a slow count of 20. The mixer breaks up the protein powder and helps mix the ingredients together.

What Is A Shaker Cup, Anyway?

Shaker cup. Shaker bottle. Protein shaker. Mixing bottle. Handheld mixer. Whatever you call it—and the names are numerous—we’re talking about the container used to mix up your protein shakes.

But what is a shaker cup, exactly, and what makes it different from a standard water bottle or lidded cup? The standout feature of any shaker cup is a mixing mechanism that works to break up and blend ingredients into a smooth liquid shake. Even the mixing mechanism can be called many different things—whisk ball, shaker ball, mixer ball, or agitator, to name a few.

In addition to the agitator, there are several other features that differentiate various shaker cups, and figure in when choosing the best protein shaker for you. It just so happens we know a thing or two about the topic; our standard-setting is the world’s best-selling shaker cup, and since launching our original bottle in 2004, we’ve designed numerous other innovative shakers to meet specific needs.

Let’s take a look at the features that are important in any shaker cup.

The Bottle Material

There are three main components to a protein shaker: the bottle material, the mixing mechanism, and the lid. The bottle material not only makes a difference aesthetically, it can impact the taste and temperature of your shake.

Plastic shaker cups are the most common type—but not all plastics are the same. It’s important to make sure your shaker is BPA and phthalate free, like all BlenderBottle? brand shakers. Otherwise, harmful chemicals can leach into your drink. One of the best food-grade plastics is Eastman Tritan?, known for its extreme durability and clarity, as well as being stain and odor resistant—a highly desirable quality that prevents today’s smoothie from tasting like last week’s protein shake. Many plastic shaker cups feature Eastman Trita as the bottle material.

Insulated shaker cups keep drinks cold, making them an extra refreshing option on hot days, or helping to preserve freshness if you don’t drink the entire shake at once. We use double-wall vacuum-insulated stainless steel in bottles, which keeps the contents chilled for up to 24 hours.

There are few things better than a delicious cup of coffee. That gentle aroma as you bring your coffee cup or glass to your face; that first sip, as you appreciate the flavour notes for the first time; that oh-so-satisfying mouthfeel; and that aftertaste that lingers on your tongue…

But what if your choice of cup, mug, or glass was preventing you from enjoying the full effect of that exceptional specialty coffee? And conversely, what if it could make your coffee taste even better?

Mark Vecchiarelli is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of KRUVE, famous for creating sifters which ensure greater grind size accuracy. His company has recently launched on Indiegogo their newest product: the KRUVE EQ, a set of two glasses designed to enhance different attributes in your coffee, along with a glass carafe.

In creating this glassware set, Mark and his team has thoroughly researched the science linking coffee flavour and drinking vessel. And so he’s agreed to tell me what you should look out for when selecting your coffee cup – or glass.

WHY DOES COFFEE NEED A SPECIAL CUP?

The average coffee mug, as we know it, is designed with one purpose in mind: to be a safe option for serving generic hot liquids. In other words, we can drink our favourite beverage without getting burned. Yet this says nothing about the vessel’s ability to enhance (or obscure) the flavours of our coffee.

It turns out that there is extensive research into the ideal vessel shape, size, and material for drinking coffee; it’s just that there are few options available for coffee aficionados to choose from.

“For some time now, we’ve seen cafés, baristas, and coffee-lovers using glasses that were either not originally intended for coffee (i.e. wine glasses or scotch snifters) or using coffee glassware that would help but doesn’t really hit all the marks when it came to optimising the sensory experience,” says Mark.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE IDEAL COFFEE VESSEL

Study after study has found that everything from a drinking vessel’s texture, size, and shape down to its colour has an impact on the consumer’s perception of the beverage’s flavour.

For example, a 2017 cross-cultural study examining the shape-taste relationship between mugs and the coffee served in them found that test subjects tended to associate narrower mugs with greater aromatics, shorter mugs with bitter and intense coffees, and wider mugs with sweeter flavours.

Other studies, such as van Rompay et al. in 2016, have looked into the perceived flavour of a bitter drink (coffee) versus a sweet drink (hot chocolate). Bitterness ratings were reportedly 27% higher when participants drank from a mug with a 3D-printed angular surface pattern, while sweetness ratings were 18% higher when participants held a rounded-surface mug.

Fabiana Carvalho, the Brazilian PhD researcher behind The Coffee Sensorium, an academic research project into flavour. She is currently working on matching certain vessels with certain coffee flavour profiles in the same way, for example, that Riedel glasses have different shapes to enhance the flavour and age of different wines.

The bulk of her research looks into the impact of all the other senses on the perceived taste of a coffee. According to her studies, the colour pink and rounded cups are strongly associated with sweetness, tulip-shaped cups increase the perceived aroma, and more.

Humans can be pretty contrary at the best of times. When it's cold, we want to warm up; when it's hot, we want to cool down. That's because we're warm-blooded creatures who need to keep our body temperatures more or less constant, at around 37°C (98.6°F), just to survive. Vacuum flasks are a bit like people in this respect: they like to keep things at steady temperatures. If you put hot drinks in them, they keep them hot; if you put cold drinks in them, they keep them cool. They're simple, neat, and effective—but how exactly do they work?

How heat travels

Before we can understand why flasks are so fantastic, we need to understand a bit more about how heat travels.

Heat is a kind of energy that moves around our world in three different ways called conduction, convection, and radiation. If you touch something hot, heat flows straight into your body because there's a direct connection between you and the hot object. Heat conduction happens only when things touch.

Convection, on the other hand, can happen without the need for direct contact. If you switch on a fan heater, it blows hot air through a grille into your room. Hot air is less dense (lighter, effectively) than cold air so it rises upwards. As hot air starts to climb up from a fan heater, it has to push colder air out of its way. So the cooler air near the ceiling of your room moves back toward the floor to get out of the way. Pretty soon, there's a kind of invisible conveyor belt of warming, rising air and cooling falling air and this gradually warms up the room. When heat moves in this way, using a moving liquid or gas to travel from one place to another, we call it convection. Heating soup in a saucepan is another way of using convection.

Radiation is slightly different again from conduction and convection. When objects are hot, they give off light. That's why camp fires glow red, orange, and yellow. This happens because the atoms in hot objects become "excited" and unstable when they gain extra heat energy from the fire. Since they're unstable, the atoms quickly return to their normal state—and give off the energy they had as light. (Read more about how and why this happens in our longer article about light.) Sometimes we can see the light that atoms produce and sometimes not. If the light they produce is just a bit too red for our eyes to see, it's called infrared radiation and, rather than seeing it, we feel it as heat. You can feel the infrared given off by hot objects even if you're not touching them (so there's no conduction) and there's no air or liquid present to carry heat either (so there's no convection). Radiation explains why we can feel heat coming from old-style, incandescent lamps even though they're surrounded by glass with a vacuum inside.

Why your coffee goes cold

Suppose you've just made a hot pot of coffee. You'll be well aware that you need to drink it quickly before it goes cold—but why does it go cold? Boiling water has a temperature of 100°C (212°F), while room temperature is more likely to be 15-20°C (60-70°F), depending on the weather and whether you have your heating on. Since the water in your drink is so much hotter than the room, heat flows rapidly from the coffee pot into the surroundings. Some heat will be lost by conduction: because your coffee pot is standing on a table or worktop, heat will flow directly downward and disappear that way. The air directly above and all around the pot will be warmed by it and start moving around, so more heat will be lost by convection. And some heat will also be lost by radiation.