Back when I started mountain biking you didn’t have full- suspension or even a suspension fork but you did get two water bottle mounts – one on the down tube the other on the seat tube. These days a lot of bikes come with no water bottle capacity, but there are a couple of systems on the market, including the Fidlock Twist Uni-Base I tested a few months ago, and this new Anywhere Bottle Cage Adapter from SKS.

What you can see here is actually a SKS TopCage bolted onto the adapter. The adapter consists of two angular blocks that you attach to the frame tube with two 300mm long Velcro straps, which means they’ll fit tubes up to 80mm in diameter. It also means you can use a different brand cage if you prefer, which prompts my first question – why didn’t SKS make the adapter available individually?

If you have space for a full-sized cage, the Anywhere cage is simple to fit, but I was expecting it to be e-bike friendly and, while I could squeeze this on the Moustache Game 8 I reviewed recently, the straps are not long enough for typically bigger e-bike down tubes. You can buy extra-long 450mm Velcro straps on Amazon for around £1.50, but the base of the mounts don’t match larger diameter tubes, so the whole thing moves as you take the bottle in and out. Also, on the bike I tested it on, this movement has marked the paintwork.

Being able to mount a bottle to a bike that doesn’t have one is a godsend for shorter rides, especially on an e-bike. However, compared to the Fidlock, the SKS system takes up more space and doesn’t fit as big a range of tubes out-of-the-box, so you’ll need to spend extra to get it to work.