Somebody Finally Needs To Say It--Insulated Cups Are Keeping Your Coffee Too Damn Hot For Too Damn Long
umesh chandra. Getty Images.In case you haven't been paying attention, there has been a turf war brewing over the past few years in the insulated cup/tumbler industry. Plenty of new players have entered the battlefield, and none of them will stop until they reign supreme. You have Yeti, you have Rtic, you have HydroFlask, now you have Stanley Cup out here cornering the market. With each new player that comes into the war, the technology thrown into these cups gets more advanced.
They want to be able to keep your drink cold even if you get stuck in the middle of a raging forest fire, and they want to be able to keep your drink hot even if you get trapped in Antarctica for an entire month. Hell, even the generic no-name brands now have the capabilities to keep your morning cup of coffee scolding hot until next Tuesday.
I fear that not only have we reached the breaking point, but we flew right past it. At some point someone has to step up and say enough is enough. That point is now, and I suppose that someone is me.
I can't tell you the last time I was able to pour coffee into a travel tumbler in the morning and been able to actually enjoy that coffee before lunch. Hours pass by and that shit is still piping hot to the point where you feel like you're slugging down molten lava. And sure, I get that there are workarounds to this. You could leave the lid off, you could put ice cubes in with your coffee to cool it down. But a few retorts to those suggestions:
1) Taking off the lid defeats the purpose of a travel mug, especially if you're driving. You don't want piping hot coffee spilling all over the place just because some jackass decided to design a cup that somehow makes your drink hotter over time.
2) Putting ice cubes in your coffee is just going to dilute it and give you watery coffee. Gross.
And 3) I just want to be able to have a cup of coffee that stays hot for like 45 minutes to an hour without getting ice cold in 5 minutes or remain piping hot a few hours later. Is that really so much to ask for?
The turf war between all these drinkware companies comes at a cost. All of our tastebuds have become sacrificial casualties to their ongoing battle to take out one another. The daunting reality is that there's seemingly no turning back now. The best you can hope for right now is that you burn your tongue to a crisp and just lose sense of hot and cold. Unless one of these companies decides to step up and go back to making travel mugs for normal ass people who just need to commute in the morning, rather than someone living in the woods for a month.