Fresh to the Handcart: SmartCafé Cafetiere Mug
Posted 1 year ago at 10:22 am. 1 comment
Like many, my day rarely starts in earnest until I’ve had a cup of coffee. Instant coffee is the work, of course, of a bitter little scientist with poor personal hygiene and very, very small genitals, who wished to take out his angst on the rest of us, and so I have a dinky little cafetiere at work. Thing is, it’s still got enough for a few big mugs with some to spare, and while that’s a delicious caffeine buzz I have to be careful unless I want my wagging tongue to tell management a few home-truths.
So let me introduce my latest gadget review, only this isn’t so much of a gadget and it’s not going to be much of a review; the SmartCafé cafetiere mug. A double-walled plastic mug with built-in French-press-style plunger mechanism, it promises an individual cup of steaming coffee without me having to wastefully pour away the rest of the jug.
It’s a cup. So it holds liquid and stops you from having to drink directly from the kettle. You don’t care how much it weighs, because you’ve held a cup before, haven’t you. Needless to say it’s not as heavy as a brick (or a ceramic mug for that matter) but it’s heavier than a shrew. Since you can’t drink coffee out of a shrew (unless you’re a sick bastard with very little thirst) that’s not exactly an issue.
Operation is simple. Put in ground coffee. Pour on water just off the boil (boiling water burns the oils in the coffee and gives it an unpleasantly bitter taste) up to the ‘max’ line, which is around a centimetre beneath the rim. Stir, leave for 3-4 minutes, then slide the plunger into groove and gently press down. Add milk, cream, sugar, syrup, bran-flakes, eye of newt and whatever else people slosh into perfectly innocent coffee these days. Drink.
Of course, if you want to be a paranoid idiot you’ll follow the supplied instructions to the letter, including “place hot cafetiere mug on a flat, heat-proof, non-slip surface.” That means you probably shouldn’t attempt to use the mug on the hind-quarters of a cat.
Does it work? Well yes, thanks for asking, it does. Initially I wondered if coffee grounds would escape around the sides of the filter, but aside from a couple of extra grains at the very bottom there aren’t any more in my cup than there are from a traditional cafetiere, and the mesh is fine enough to do its job properly. The outer walls of the mug are warm to the touch but not hot, while the coffee inside seems to be maintaining its warmth. Obviously it’s not going to be as efficient as a proper vacuum-walled flask, and much of the heat escapes from the top rather than radiating out of the sides, but every little helps.
Is it worth the £4.95 ($9.92) I paid for it? Personally, yes. If you’re a thirsty traveller than you might like their cafetiere travel cup, which is a little under twice the price but probably holds twice as much, as well as having a non-spill cap. I, however, am able to conduct myself with some degree of stability and am rarely prone to spilling drinks all over myself.
The Dante’s Handcart Duck awards this product 12 out of 15 Quacks
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