Also if you have a really weird water bottle and you don't know if the spout assembly can be taken apart, find out and do it and wash in there too!

One time I drank from a thermos with like a dogbowl spout that you could sip from any direction and it was making drinks taste inexplicably spicy and I only found out after hurling and being bedridden for a day that actually the spout comes apart and it was full of mold

it's running in the dishwasher as we speak!

you can get little oxygen bleach tablets for water bottles and those are great, i love them. I do wash them with soap and a brush mostly but once in a while i like to give em a fizzing.

That's why I like having a steel water bottle, I can just fill it (and flush the cap) with boiling-hot water and be certain all the germs are dead :)

If you have a dishwasher: on average, using a dishwasher kills more bacteria than handwashing. Bacterial removal isn’t always super important in some dishes (let’s be honest, if I just make a sandwich on a plate, I’m rinsing it off and that’s it), but I would consider making sure to put your water bottles in the dishwasher if they’re dishwasher safe. I have two water bottles, and my rule is everytime I start the dishwasher I have to put at least one of them in, that way I always have a clean one, it’s a really helpful system.

(of course you can hand wash them safely too, people have done it for centuries, and the whole “dishwashing is better than handwashing” depends a lot on different factors, just make sure you’re doing it correctly and not just rinsing it and going “job done”… like I did for way too long. I know it’s faster to do a half job and I know you’re running later because you’re bad at time, but water bottles are a matter of national security so bust out the damn soap and straw brush thingy)

the straw is exactly why I got one of those big metal water bottles

MUCH easier to clean

I would like to thank posts like these because I am blessed enough to have a water glass system instead of water bottles due to boring personal details, but I used to be pretty lax about getting those cups rotated out/cleaned on the regular. Once I saw enough posts about BACTERIA IS NOT A FLAVOR I finally did woefully belated 1+1 about how rarely my cup saw the inside of a dishwasher and how my incurable mild mouth infections tended to ramp up over time alongside that. Now I have 3 identical cups meeting my demands and they tag out every single day at breakfast. Peace and love on Earth.