What Skiers Need to Know About ZipFit’s Ultralight Espresso Boot Liner

Among skiers and bootfitters alike, there’s a lot of debate about who makes the best custom ski boot liner. For many skiers, the stock liners that come in your off-the-shelf boots just don’t quite cut it, with limited customization, a tendency to pack out after just a few days of skiing, and uncomfortable pressure points due to a generic, “one-size-fits-all” design. Luckily, there are quite a few aftermarket options available for anyone looking to upgrade their ski boots to be more comfortable, warmer, and perform better–but there’s been a bit of a hole in the market when it comes to upgrading liners on lightweight ski touring boots.

That’s where the Italian experts at ZipFit come in. For many years, the factory in Montebelluna, Italy has been manufacturing the highest-quality ski boot liners based on the ideas of founder and visionary gear designer Sven Coomer. A few years ago, ZipFit launched their first touring-specific custom liner called the ZipFit GFT (depending on who you ask, that might stand for “Great For Touring,” or “Grand F-in Teton”–an homage to a favorite ski objective of a certain subset of skiers here in the Tetons). For many backcountry skiers, the GFT represented a quantum leap in improving the fit, performance, and comfort of their touring boots, but many found that the leather and cork construction was too heavy and too high volume to fit inside lighter two-buckle ski mountaineering boots. Luckily, ZipFit has been listening, and the new ZipFit Espresso Touring Liner seems purpose-built to fill those shoes.

I’ve been testing the new ZipFit liner this winter in both the 4-buckle gold standard Tecnica Zero G Tour Pro and Dynafit Blacklight 2.0 ski touring boots to get a feel for how it works across a wide spectrum of popular ski touring boots. In short, I’ve been truly impressed with these from a performance and durability standpoint and think this might be the best custom ski boot liner for light ski touring boots.

ZipFit Espresso Touring Liner Specs

• Sizes available: 21.5-31.5
• Size tested: 27.5
• Material: OMFit Cork, Ultralon Foam, Kevlar, plastic
• Weight: 320g (size 26.5)

Design

ZipFit’s liners have all followed nearly the same design principle since they were first introduced, with durable leather construction filled with malleable cork that allow for heat-moldable customization. The cork fills several isolated pockets to allow for extra volume to be added to the liner in locations around the ankle/heels and instep/shin area. 

The new Espresso liner utilizes the same cork fitting system but skips the heavy-duty leather construction. Instead, the liner is made of various foams and lighter abrasion-resistant materials. Up front, there’s a warm but flexible Flexalon toe box with a ceramic stone face fabric. The side panels and tongue are made of Ultralon foam (heat-moldable closed-cell foam, similar to what Intuition uses in their liners). Right above the heel pocket, ZipFit added an oval cutout section with lower-density foam that essentially acts as a hinge to permit a comfortable range of motion for touring. The tongue also has a shaped hard plastic panel on the front. On the back cuff, there’s a small Kevlar sleeve pocket that holds a high-density polyethylene volume-spacer shim.

The tongue is held in place with ZipFit’s innovative quick-lace system that threads a low-profile but extremely strong piece of cord through cuff eyelets and a hole in the middle of the tongue, held together with a locking plastic cinch. That makes pulling the liner tight around your ankle and shin a simple one-handed affair. 

On Snow With The ZipFit Espresso Touring Liner

A question I asked myself as I began testing these was “Why would anyone need to replace the liner in a lightweight boot?” After all, these kinds of boots are really designed around the idea of shaving weight wherever possible and optimizing uphill performance above all. Downhill performance and comfort are often an afterthought, as many aggressive skiers will have noticed who have tried these kinds of boots. Well, the answer was staring me right in the face: swap that liner in order to improve both comfort and downhill performance. 

As I mentioned, I tested the Espresso liner in both Tecnica’s Zero G Tour Pro and Dynafit’s Blacklight 2.0 boots. These are very different boots from both a design perspective and their intended use case. However, both are medium to low-volume options with very thin carbon-reinforced plastic shells. I’ve skied both boots extensively with their stock liners and have been pretty happy with them, but didn’t realize what I was missing out on until I switched in the new Espresso liner.

On the Zero G–a stiff 4-buckle freetouring boot–the new liner vastly improved comfort and fit. Like it does in any other ZipFit liner, the cork does an unmatched job of filling in the space between your foot and the inside of the plastic shell exactly where it needs to. I was lucky to not have any major qualms about the stock fit of these boots, but there were some loose spots around the heel and ankle which are now perfectly filled in with the Espresso liner. Secondly, being able to cinch down the tongue with the quick-lace system allows the liner and boot to hold my foot much more securely–kind of like a race boot. 

It wasn’t until I popped this liner into the 1140g Dynafit Blacklight 2.0 that I realized how much the Espresso liner can actually improve the performance of a boot. Ultralight boots are notoriously bad at providing the fore/aft support necessary for aggressive skiing. Most of these boots lack a tongue and don't have a great cuff/lower connection for power transfer leading to sloppy performance. Dynafit’s internal Hoji Lock walk mechanism works wonders to solve this (it’s an impressively stiff boot), but the lightweight construction and lack of a tongue still doesn’t quite give the “suspension-like” feel of a heavier overlap-style boot like the Zero G. The plastic panel on the tongue of the Espresso liner, combined with the locked-in feel of the quick-lace system, adds a substantial amount of stiffness and damping to the boot, making this what I can comfortably say is the best-skiing two-buckle boot I’ve ever skied in. Better yet, the flexible foam hinge allows for no perceptible limit of the boot’s massive range of motion in walk mode, meaning there’s no loss in uphill performance.

One note on the quick lace system: I found it challenging at first to get the boot on and off. However, it actually just took a few days to break in the liner to get it soft enough to slide my foot in and out. Like other ZipFit liners, I put these on “World Cup” style, meaning I put my liner on outside of the boot, then slide it in before buckling everything up.

The Kevlar cuff spoiler pocket is a really nifty little piece of design work–simple, yet extremely effective. I end up throwing a hard plastic spoiler into almost every boot I ski in. That helps with both adding a few degrees to the forward lean and taking up volume behind my calf for better response in the boots. The problem with adding a hard plastic spoiler in touring boots is two-fold. First, most stock liners don’t have an effective way of attaching a big enough one. Secondly, the spoiler wedge tends to move around when I’m walking or touring in most boots. Having it slot neatly into a super abrasion-resistant pocket on the Espresso solves both of those problems and helps to additionally improve the fit and performance of the boots.

I have now been skiing the Espresso liner since mid-December and have put 20-25 days of touring on it. The durability of these has been nothing short of impressive–especially given that they come in and out of the boot every time I wear them. So far, there are almost no visible signs of wear, and I promise that I have not been babying them.

What type of skier is the ZipFit Espresso Touring Liner best for?

It’s clear that ZipFit did their homework with the new Espresso Touring Liner. In a product line that features everything from World Cup-level race liners, to all-day comfort liners for recreational skiers, to ones for hybrid boots, the Espresso fills a small but very deep void. It's not for alpine boots, instead focusing on the opposite end of the boot spectrum: lightweight ski touring boots.

Without a doubt, this liner is going to make those lightweight boots perform significantly better, especially if you're looking for a higher performance fit in notoriously hard-to-fit boots. Whether you’re looking to upgrade the performance of something slightly heavier like a Tecnica Zero G or a Dynafit Ridge Pro, a two-buckle ski mountaineering boot like the Dynafit Blacklight 2.0, La Sportiva Kilo, Scarpa F1 (or any version thereof), or potentially even a true skimo racing boot like the Dynafit Mezzalama, look no further than the Espresso.