Review: Montane Alpine 850 Nano Hoodie - Jacket
What we liked
Super light
High warmth to weight ratio
The feel of the Pertex Quantum fabric
Dries extremely quickly
What we didn’t
Sizes-up a bit short in arm and body
Stuff-sack floats free in the pocket - gets in the way
The zip pulls feel a bit tiny and sharp-edged
Lack of inner ‘stuff’ pockets
The Verdict
THE SHORT READ…
The Montane Alpine 850 Nano Hoodie is an ultra light-weight puffer jacket that you won’t notice in your backpack, which uses a combination of down and synthetic insulations, in a relatively slim fit that’s designed to keep you warm on the move, and which dries quicker than regular down by adding actual gold particles to the down to vibrate you to warmth again. While we do point out some minor niggles, it does it’s primary functions really well (and suprisingly well on the drying front) - read on to find out more!
THE LONG READ …
We love a warm but very light puffer, here at Backdrop - ones that will keep the chill off when being blasted by the wind on a ridge but won’t boil you in a bag when you are actually moving. How does the Montane Alpine 850 Nano Hoodie stack up, then?
Fabric, Construction & Weight - It’s uber-light, only 235g in size Large. Plus, it packs down really well, as down does, into it’s own stuff sack. It won’t take up much room in your backpack, for sure. The fabric feels really nice - it’s Pertex Quantum and doesn’t seem to get static-y when moving against your skin. Construction seems top-quality.
Most of the insulation is goose down, but there are two areas where synthetic insulation - Primaloft Gold (100% recycled) - is used, in the high-moisture area under the armpits, and also in a panel in front of your throat and up under the chin.
Fit - It is slim-fit, but not tight. It’s not super generous in arm-length and body-length though. I’d never normally wear an XL but feel I needed it here - on something that is designed to keep out the chill, I want the sleeves to be generous and really cover my whole wrist and actually start to run up over my hands, but I feel the L needs at least another 1-2 cm of sleeve length to do that. Body length is ok, but again, could do with perhaps another cm extra. The good news is, with it being slim fit, in the next size up there probably won’t be too much extra flapping around your middle.
Do up the main zip and it’s nicely cosy around the neck, the elasticated hood hem helping to block out drafts.
Performance - It is aimed at keeping you warm, but not too warm during movement. It’s not a belaying jacket, for example, where you are standing around for ages not moving much. I found the warmth-to-weight ratio to be satisfyingly high, even when just standing around though. And we are all different in how much heat we give off when moving - for me it’s quite a lot - but I was able to stay comfortable moving, controlling heat-retention with the main zip just fine.
The aspect of it’s performance that astonished me was how quick-drying it is. The goose down inside is ExpeDRY, which essentially bonds gold particles to the down. Any heat basically warms the gold up first, the vibrations of which then warms up the down faster than it would otherwise - this not only keeps the jacket drier when sweating and moving, but if you get soaked will get the jacket drier faster as well. They say “50% faster” and I was prepared to be underwhelmed but in a test where I soaked the arm of the jacket while wearing it (it took a while, and hand-pressure, to get through the DWR), with cold water, outside on a 1 degree C day. Honestly, even in that temp it dried at least 50% faster than the synthetic jacket I did the same test on. After 15 mins it was noticeably drier, whereas the synthetic still felt just as wet as it had started. True, immediately after the initial wetting, the synthetic jacket was warmer, as you’d expect in that comparison, but how quickly the down dried compared to the synthetic was frankly astonishing.
Yes, it is still down, so when it had dried again, the goose down that had gotten soaked had packed-down noticeably, compared to the down that had not gotten wet, and it stayed packed-down, losing some of it’s warming ability and would need a nice tumble-dry to restore it’s fluffiness. But down jackets are targetted at drier climates, or to have a rain shell over the top, so this is to be expected.
The water-repellency, i.e. DWR, is very good out of the box, with water beading off nicely. In the test above, I had to work a bit with my hands to force the water into through to the down and really get it soaked. Only time will tell how long that lasts, of course, but the Pertext Quantum is very tighthly woven, which will help a lot.
Zips & Pockets - It has two hand pockets, with the insulation on the exterior of the pocket only, which is good, your body will do the warming on the inside. A gripe here is that I really feel it’s missing a couple of internal ‘stuff’ pockets though, one each side, for stuffing larger items like a hat, or gloves in, next to your body where it’s warm. There is no chest pocket either, which is less of an gripe but which would have been nice. I know it’s about keeping weight down but we all love having enough pockets on external clothes.
The zip-pulls are very light-weight also, and feel quite sharp-edged with bare hands. The feel of those could have been made nicer, I think. But, they do keep the weight down and are long enough to use with gloves on.
Hood - Insulated as well. Relatively close-fitting, and while not advertised as helmet-compatible, I did get it most of the way over a climbing helmet (just a couple of inches of the front not covered).
Cuffs - On the Alpine 850 Nano, the elasticated sleeve cuffs are set back inside the jacket a couple of cm, same with the lower cuff around the hem of the jacket. This means that a bit of the insulation projects over the elastic and isn’t in contact with the skin. That would be totally fine if the sleeve-length was really generous, but, as noted, the arm-length sizes up a bit short, so I felt that the end bit of the cuff wasn’t really contributing any warmth. Go one size larger than you normally would.
There is no drawcord around the hem of the jacket, but it’s close-fitting there anyway, so it doesn’t seem needed.
Stuff-sack - This is my biggest gripe. Instead of one of the pockets having a double-sided zip-pull, there is a separate (but removable) stuff-sack attached inside the right-side waist-pocket, and it just kind of floats around in there when not being used, so every time you put your hand in your pocket, it’s in there. If you put a hat or glove in that pocket, then take that out, quite often the stuff-sack comes out too and you have to stuff it back in the pocket again.
SUMMARY…
As a super-light, high warmth-to-weight ratio jacket, meant to keep you warm while you are moving, the Montane Alpine 850 Nano is excellent. And if you need a down jacket that dries noticeably more quickly than even an equivalent-weight synthetic insulation jacket (and who wouldn’t) then even better. The slim/active fit feels really nice, as does the shell material itself.
Yes, you might detach the stuff-sack and, er, ‘file’ that somewhere, and it might be missing a couple of large internal stuff pockets, but on balance, these are minor compared the primary job the jacket is designed for, and which it does really well. Just make sure you size up one more than you usually take, as the sleeve and body length are not particularly generous - the slim fit should allow you to do this, unless you are extremely light-weight yourself!