Mo Mug →
The guy selling this coffee mug on Kickstarter emailed me and wanted me to blog about it. I’ve inadvertently gotten myself on a lot of Kickstarter spam-I-mean-“PR” email lists. But I can be brutally honest when a product underwhelms.
I haven’t tried a Mo Mug, but I think porcelain was the wrong choice. The seller is correct that plastic alters the taste of hot drinks (as does the stainless steel in most travel mugs), but porcelain needs to be so thick that it acts as a giant heatsink, causing the tea or coffee to lose heat far too quickly. That’s why travel mugs aren’t made of porcelain. The Mo Mug’s double-walled design will probably help with another big issue — that porcelain mugs are too hot to handle directly — but it won’t be enough insulation to keep the drink hot meaningfully longer than an average porcelain mug.
If you want to make a reusable coffee mug from a breakable but flavor-inert material, borosilicate glass is a far better choice: it can be much thinner, and a double-walled design will insulate far better with much less material.
And Grosche has already made exactly that, with a silicone lid and collar available in four different colors, for about 12 bucks. I bought one a year ago and it’s great. It doesn’t keep drinks as hot as my Contigo, but it has no noticeable effect on flavor, so I use it for bringing coffee in the car on shorter trips.
But it doesn’t have a moustache painted on it. So the Mo Mug still has a market, I guess.