Coffee Kit: Travel mug

Aladdin Travel mug

Recently I was given a travel mug for Christmas. It's the Aladdin recycled plastic mug which does a great job for a number of reasons.

No odd taste

This was actually the most important part for me. I've owned a number of different travel mugs/vacuum flasks, but most of them have metal on the inside, which makes the coffee taste funny. And when you care about the taste of coffee enough to write a blog about it, then this matters. There are apparently a number of methods you can use to eliminate this, but they sound a bit complex. This mug has no discernible impact on the taste of the coffee, though I should say I have only tried it with my standard Lavazza-in-a-cafetiere morning coffee routine.

It's recycled

It's made of other plastic bits. Usually that's a good thing (I say usually because there are some recycling processes that are worse than starting from scratch), and here they claim to use up to 95% recycled plastic. And the mug can be re-recycled, according to their website.

It's watertight

I don't know why this is not more common, but so many travel mugs have slide openings at the top which are not actually watertight. They're completely fine if you're just carrying the mug from home on the train or similar, but you can't put them in a bag (in case they fall over) and there's always a bit of concern if you're putting them in a car and they slosh around a bit.

These mugs don't have that issue - the lid clips shut and I've had no qualms about putting it in my bag even upside down (though there's no need to tempt fate). Better yet - you can still open and close it with one hand, though reassuringly it's not very easy.

It actually keeps your drink quite hot

Though this is the weakest point, the mug does a great job at keeping the drink inside hot. You can put it in your bag when you leave home and half an hour later it's at a great temperature. I reckon a neoprene sleeve would cover over the weakness of it not keeping it hot for hours, but for a commuter mug it's great.

Any downsides?

Apart from the fact that it won't act as a long-term solution, the only downside that I could think of is that it can't be put in a dishwasher. But as I'm using it every weekday, that isn't really a problem. And washing it out on a daily basis keeps the likelihood of an odd taste creeping in to a minimum.