Temperature control mugs tested
seriouseats.com
seriouseats.com
I've been extremely happy with this $25 USD warming plate[1]. It has good old-fashioned controls on it, so you don't need to install a privacy-invasive and bug-ridden app on your mobile device to use it. Related, I'm very grateful for the Chinese companies producing these types of cheap products. Simple is often the best solution!
I've also really enjoyed this product for keeping cans of soda cold[2].
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/PUSEE-Electric-Gravity-Induction-Sett...
Double Walled Glass Mug is far better for an open cup experience, when paired with a hot water tank you basically have everything you need for a drink that will stay warm for the entire duration you are drinking it and you don't need to make it ahead of time.
For travel a pre-heated double wall thermos is sufficient, I guess the fully enclosed ember thermos might work in those cases too.
The mere fact it has the ability to do that makes me worry that the rest of the products safety hasn't been thought out.
It was awful. Only thing it could realistically do is keep an already hot drink hot - which by itself isn't bad if it didn't advertise itself as being able to make a not hot drink become hot.
Worse still, getting it to work with the app was a CONSTANT struggle. If you even managed to get it connected in the first place (only worked one out of 5-10 tries in my experience, usually requiring a full factory reset of the mug each time), it would automatically disconnect itself after a couple hours, requiring you to do the whole song and dance again.
Left a seriously bad taste in my mouth about Bluetooth devices as a whole.
I bought it because .. why not. I discovered that the problem it was solving didn't exist and disposed of it. :)
It helps that the default behavior is pretty much what you expect, and so it's not necessary to go into the app except when I want to "force" a reheat of a room-temperature beverage.
I expected to hate it, would never have bought one, but having received this as a gift from my partner -- it's actually grown on me, and I like it now.
One other side note, the pogo pins on the charging pad are a wear item and will eventually fail. You can get them from DigiKey (952-3127-1-ND) and they're easy to replace with a little basic soldering.
I totally understand why but still. Firmware updates on a coffee mug.
FWIW, my fiancée loves hers. She apparently drinks her coffee much more slowly than I do; having her coffee stay warm all morning is a big improvement over a standard ceramic mug.
Of course it certainly doesn't help that most mobile apps are extremely crummy.
If it could be thrown in a dishwasher with the rest of the utensils, I suppose I would've used it more.
It might be a bad option for other use cases. But for my two criteria, I love the little thing.
Oh, but I turn the heating off when it gets to the final 10-15% of the liquid left or I get a sort of burnt taste.
It is designed and advertised to keep a hot drink hot, which as you say, it does well!
They don't advertise it as a heater, and explicitly say that it won't work.
https://support.ember.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002625471-Emb...
Maybe they could be more clear to avoid misunderstanding. But it works great it keeping a cup of coffee warm, and I've never even installed the app.
Hot garbage, which is a shame because the idea is good.
Nowadays I just use a good thermos, and pour my hot drink into a standard cup when I want a refill. Problem solved, zero electronics required.
I'll never understand these things.
They're not fragile, the coffee stays just as hot for at least 4 hours if not much longer, and because "effective insulation" means "doesn't exchange much air" it also keeps it from oxidizing as quickly.
As pointed out in the introduction of the article, this is not the same use-case; there are some types of coffee or tea that require specific infusion temperature and duration, something you can’t do with a normal mug or a thermos.
You can however prepare them using a thermometer, you don’t need a "smart" mug.
If you're using an AI summarizer, maybe check the output more closely?
No need to be aggressive; I’m not using an AI summarizer. I pointed out this is a different use-case, and then gave an example based on my own experience. I’m sorry if this was not correctly worded and felt like this was the use-case the article was refering to.
It will also keep your coffee lip-blistering hot for way too long. Keeping things hot with a vacuum flask is a problem solved 100 years ago. But that's the other side of these mugs: they are supposed to bring the temperature down to (and keep it at) the temperature you specify. Double-walled mugs don't do me any good if 30 minutes later the fluid is still at 198F/92C.
So either I read the full article to figure out the different time they take to cool down, or feed the article to GPT and ask it to provide me with the full table I need to compare the products.
The author's data appears to be a near exact fit to a*x^b+c with a=247.6 deg F, b=-0.453, and c = 48.1 deg F with R2 = 0.999.
Kinda weird, since 48.1 deg F is an odd asymptotic approach. However, it does take 1000 minutes to get below a normal room temperature (65?).
Implies that the ideal serving time from the author's prep method is approximately: ~3.75-4 minutes for a serving temperature of 185 deg F, with drinking and consumption perhaps 5 minutes afterward.
From this article: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nhan-Pham-Phuoc/publica...
135 deg F does seem to be a reasonable choice for consumption, as it's the range where coffee caffeine extraction has mostly halted in the coffee grounds.
Also, at least the author's honest, that it seems silly even your coffee mug has an "app" these days.
I used to use the app, but like a lot of my "smart" appliances I found it's not much of a value add, so I just use the device as is.
https://joeveo.com/pages/the-temperfect-mug
I've used one daily since 2015. It's excellent. Gets a coffee to the right drinking temp in moments then keeps it there. No charging pads, controls, etc. Just works. Best thing I've ever backed on Kickstarter.
It seems like it would just muddle the temperature down to mildly above room temperature over multiple minutes. So that the drink and material are the same temperature but the material holds heat due to being insulated on one side. What this would mean is the mug would get less effective as you drink more.
The insulated mug would make the time longer but it is no where near something like the Ember that converts electricity to heat.
Seems like KS schlock for people that don't want to think about if / how it works.
For instance, the lid didn't have enough threading, and as a result would spill coffee. I don't know if they've fixed that, but it was clear just from looking at it that it needed more threads.
Travel mugs are just far more unpleasant to drink out of, and when coffee is about 140 degrees, I don't find myself spending hours sipping at it. It takes me about 5-10 minutes to go through.
A heavy mug already perform this task alright without the clever phase transition, but I drink enough coffee for it to be worth $100 to slightly improve the situation with a mug with the wax tech in it.
One thing the Joeveo does do is bring the temperature down from "are those blisters on my tongue?" to a reasonable temp relatively quickly. What it doesn't do, apparently, is keep drinks hot for very long. I've only used it a few times so far, but one Saturday I took a mug of Joe on the drive to a club run and drank about half of it on the way. Came back two hours later, and the coffee was lukewarm. It's a double-walled mug, any other double-walled mug I've used for this exact use case results in reasonably warm coffee when I get back. The only difference is that the Joeveo has the PCM layered in there. (And the $200 Ember travel mug would still have 145F coffee even after several hours.)
I had high hopes, and I'll keep experimenting, but so far the Joeveo mug has been a disappointment. Thankfully it was "only" $50.
Looks like something from We Put A Chip In It: https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com