RYOT are an American outfit that make the boring-but-essential stuff: cases, bags and little wooden kits that keep your gear together and your business your own. No vaporizers, no batteries, no fuss. Just well-made carry gear that does one job and does it for years.
People in Australia went looking for RYOT for a simple reason. Discretion. A vape or a grinder is easy enough to own, but lugging it around in a way that doesn’t announce itself is the tricky part, and RYOT’s smell-proof gear and solid timber kits solve that better than a sandwich bag and hope. Here’s the range, the honest version of each.
Smell-proof cases
The smell-proof case is the one most people come for. It’s a padded zip case with an activated-carbon liner sewn in, and that carbon is the whole trick: it grabs odour molecules before they get out. Closed up in a bag, it keeps things quiet. They come in a few sizes, from a slim wallet-style sleeve up to a chunky case that swallows a portable vaporiser, a grinder and a few odds and ends.
Who’s it for? Anyone who carries gear out of the house and would rather nobody knew. Travellers, commuters, share-house dwellers.
The real quirk is the carbon. It’s a wear part, not magic. Fresh, it’s genuinely good. After six months of daily use the smell-trapping drops off, and a damp liner fades faster, so keep it dry and air it out now and then. The bigger cases also use a combination lock on the zips, which is handy until you forget the combo. Set it to something you’ll remember.
No temperatures here, this is carry gear, but a tip worth its weight: let a vaporiser cool fully before it goes in. Sealing a warm oven of a portable into a padded case is how liners pick up a baked-in smell that never quite leaves.
Dugouts
A dugout is an old idea done properly. It’s a small two-chamber box, usually wood, sometimes aluminium: one chamber holds your ground herb, the other holds a one-hitter. You twist the lid, pack the one-hitter in the herb chamber, and you’ve got a self-contained kit that fits in a jeans pocket. RYOT’s wooden ones are walnut and the like, and they’re nicely made, with a magnet or a swivel lid that doesn’t rattle open.
It suits the minimalist. If you want one tidy thing in your pocket instead of a baggie, a grinder and a loose pipe, this is it.
Quirks? Wood is wood. It’ll pick up a bit of scent over time and it doesn’t love being dropped in a puddle, so the wooden ones aren’t for the rough-and-tumble crowd. The aluminium versions shrug off more abuse but feel colder in the hand. And a dugout holds a small amount, by design, so it’s a top-up-as-you-go thing, not a week’s supply in your pocket.
Glass taster bats
The taster bat is the simplest item RYOT make. It’s a slim glass one-hitter, the piece that usually lives in the dugout’s second chamber. You pack a small pinch in one end and draw from the other. That’s the lot.
Glass is the point. It gives a cleaner-tasting hit than a metal one-hitter, and you can actually see when it’s clogging up, which metal hides until it’s gummed solid. The trade-off is obvious: it’s glass, so it’ll break if you sit on it or drop it on tiles. RYOT make digger-style ones with a wider mouth for scooping straight from a dugout, which saves the fiddle of packing by hand. If you go through one-hitters, buy the glass and accept you’ll replace it occasionally. It’s a couple of dollars and it tastes better.
Living with one
There’s not much to it, which is the appeal. Cases want an occasional airing and a wipe of the inside, and you swap the carbon liner when it stops doing its job rather than binning the whole case. Dugouts get a wipe and, if the chamber’s caked, a cotton bud with a dab of isopropyl, then dry it well before the herb goes back. Glass taster bats soak clean in iso like any glass piece, give them a rinse and let them dry. Look after the lot and it’ll outlast a few of the things it’s carrying.
Which one suits you
Quick version. Carry a bit of gear and want it discreet: a smell-proof case. Want a whole kit in one pocketable lump: a dugout. Just need a clean one-hit piece, or a spare for the dugout: a glass taster bat. Plenty of people run a case for the bag and a dugout for the pocket, and that combination covers most days.
For more carry and storage gear, have a look through our Cases & Bags, Storage & Stashes and the wider Accessories collections. If it’s odour you’re chasing down, Smoke Buddy handle the exhale side of things, and Ooze do their own range of stash gear worth a squiz.