Would you like some coffee with that whine?

I really need to find a great big, stainless steel travel mug that will keep coffee hot for, like, ten hours. If you have a line on such a beast, I’d like to know, because I’d pay very well for a mug that actually worked.

Over the past few years I’ve tried taking coffee to work in several different thermal vessels, most of then not inexpensive. None of them kept my coffee hot — really hot — for longer than an hour or so.

After several such failures, I purchased another rather expensive cup, naively believing the “guarantee” written on the packaging, and optimistically anticipating a cup of coffee that would never grow cold. As soon as I got home I boiled the kettle and poured in the water, anticipating that my test cup would stay hot forever. An hour later it was lukewarm and I was bitterly disappointed.

To console myself somewhat, I personalized that expensive mug  using the etching attachment on my husband’s Dremel tool. I felt price-bound to use the darn thing despite its dismal test drive results, and there was no way it was going to get lost or accidentally absorbed into the herd of homeless cups on the shelf in the ER pantry.

I used that cup quite a lot and I tried to make it work. I really did. In the morning I’d fill it with boiling water to heat the interior. At work I’d dump the water just before I entered the coffee shop to refill it with steaming coffee. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

Although it was the most unique stainless mug I’d ever carried, I tired of toting it around because the coffee cooled just as quickly as it would in a paper cup. Let me tell you, that was a sad waste of a really funky-looking mug. Once again I joined the long queue of caffiene-seekers at the hospital Timmys, but even that experience was rewardless. Yes, I got my wake-up jolt along with the mediocre brew, but Tim never had the good grace to put a winning rolled-up rim into my hand for two or three years a running. Foiled again!

These days, with the price of coffee getting larger and the size of cups getting smaller, plus the lack of time to actually drink my coffee at work while it’s hot, I’d love to get another mug; one that comes with a real “keep it hot” guarantee. My husband takes a big thermos of tea to work with him every day. That sucker keeps the tea so hot that if he doesn’t finish it, he’ll pour himself a mugful in the evening. It’s still steaming, and I’m green with envy.

If they can make a thermos like that, there must be a matching mug somewhere. If you know of one, please, please tell me how I can get one too. Thank you.

UPDATE: I wrote my coffee whine on Wednesday evening, and on Thursday morning I went to work. What did I see? Someone with a Starbucks mug, complaining that her tea, made a home two hours before, was too hot to drink.

I bought one of those mugs on my way home today and took it for a test drive. At three hours, boiling water I had poured into the mug was still so hot it burned me when I poured a bit out to check the temperature. Now that’s my kind of travel mug. $22.99 at your local Starbucks, folks. You heard it here.