So this showed up a few days ago, curtesy of a dear friend of my lovely wife’s, who heard me mention that it sucks when I deal with my tea going cold when I forget about it. Re-heating in the microwave sucks because it’s going from hot to cold and back to hot again, which messes with the flavour. On one of Jason Snell’s podcasts he mentioned that he has a tea warmer and because it just keeps the tea at the same temperature, that you can leave it for hours and it still tastes the same.
So my friend read my mind and picked one up and gifted it to me unexpectedly. I think that this is the one. It looks the same, but I also suspect that there are a ton of these around from randomly named sellers on Amazon (another rant for another time).
The functions are pretty simple, select ceramic, metal and glass, and three separate temperature settings (which are affected by type of mug you set). Then it’s just a setting for how long to keep it warm by hour, and voila, all done.
The only thing that was a bit tricky was the weight sensor which wasn’t enable by default (the slide switch on the left). This is the switch that controls just a little knob on the bottom so that the heat only comes on when the mug is actually on it.
The only thing that I’d change on it is for it to magically sense the amount of tea and adjust the temperature accordingly. Right now for a full cup the high setting is perfect for keeping it hot, but at a quarter cup hot is way too hot, and I have to set it down to low to not scald my poor delicate lips.
If I were to give a very quick review – 4/5 stars, solid enough build (plastic, but doesn’t feel cheap), no huge wall wart of power transformer or anything like that, and the functions all work as expected. No issues.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the orange plushie in the background is a fun reversible plush octopus that I found online. I think it’s originally something that some people use to tell people what sort of mood they’re in, either happy or not. I imagine this being really helpful in an office where you want to tell people you don’t want to be disturbed without stopping what you’re doing to tell them you don’t want to be disturbed.
Anyway, I saw this and jokingly wondered if there was one that instead of happy/angry but angry/more angry. Quick search online, and yup, found this one.