MBR Editor’s Choice 2019: Milkit Booster, £42.99

Fill it with water to stay hydrated, or change the cap, pressurise the chamber, and use it as a tubeless inflator to help seat stubborn tyres – the Milkit Booster is the perfect example of a dual-purpose product done well. Available in two different sizes – 1L and 0.6L – the Milkit is ideal to chuck in the back of the car in case you need to swap tyres on a riding trip – you can even keep it charged so that it’s ready to use.

Milkit Booster review

To seat a tyre, simply attach a pump to the Milkit Booster and inflate to 160psi. Push the Booster directly to the tubeless valve and, hey Presta!

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Originally tubeless chargers were home-brewed devices, concocted from old drinks bottles with their caps drilled to accept Presta valves. They were crude, often blew up, and rarely held the kind of pressure needed to seat a stubborn tubeless tyre, but they helped smooth a frustrating process and spawned a raft of air basting solutions. Now the Milkit Booster hat tips these early products by modifying a familiar aluminium drinks bottle into a portable charging station. As such there are two sizes to choose from, 0.6L and 1L, depending on how great you or your tyre’s thirst. Each bottle comes with two caps – a standard bottle top, for using with your favourite cold beverage, and a special thread-in inflator.

As a challenge, we tried it on a variety of large volume 2.8in and 3.0in tyres. Our 1L bottle, inflated to 140psi, seated the bead every time, although we still needed to top up the air to get the tyre to ping into place fully and bring it up to a useable pressure.

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Being that there are no hoses and it’s light and portable (although it doesn’t fit in a standard bottle cage) means you could, theoretically, use it to get out of trail-side trouble. In reality, though, you’ll never get 140psi out of a mini-pump, and you’re more likely to be repairing a hole in your tyre than a dislodged bead. As such, it’s more of a gadget for the back of the car rather than an essential for the bottom of your backpack, and a couple of CO2 cartridges would be better in an emergency.