Zojirushi Travel Mug: Almost Perfect

Also received for Christmas is this really serious, industrial-looking travel mug that my parents swear by.

For even more protection against spillage, it locks with a different satisfying click.

It has a wonderfully-shaped mouth hole that is terrifically contoured to the actual shape one’s mouth makes when sipping a beverage.

When tilted, the beverage drips and collects into this sort of rounded bowl, after dripping through two different channels….

which provides a little bit of obstruction to the stream of liquid so that the volume of liquid that comes out is a little more manageable.

So, it feels solid and is a joy to hold, reassuringly heavy, and hard to spill. And it is a vacuum flask, so it keeps the hot things hot and the cold things cold. My brother claims that once he forgot about a mug full of coffee once for a full 24 hours and came back to find it as hot as when he poured it.

And that’s true if, if, if, if, you’re lucky enough to have screwed the top on correctly at what I see as the mug’s failure point.

If not, if you screw the lid on even a little askew, that failure is where the heat escapes. And you won’t know until it’s too late. Occasionally, when anticipating waking up extremely early, I’ve made my coffee or tea at night so I can have it in the morning without thinking about it or making noise grinding it. And a handful of times, I’ve woken up to find that the heat escaped in way too few hours.

So, I just have to ask…where’s the satisfying click that lets you know you closed it correctly? You have an almost perfect mug here whose every other operation has a click to it, so please give me something tactile to confirm that I’ve made a seal at the most likely failure point. Otherwise, good job, Zojirushi!