Product Review - Klean Kanteen

So it looks like my blog posts generally fall into three categories: nostalgic coffee shop reviews, reviews of my equipment for grinding/brewing coffee, and reviews of all kinds of instant single-serving coffee drinks. What I haven’t addressed yet is what I drink coffee out of, I’ll go over some of my glassware and mugs and such later (if I decide it could be of any interest whatsoever to anyone) but for now I’ll focus on travel mugs and thermoses.

After having gone through a half dozen different travel mugs and thermoses I’m lucky enough to have finally found one that 1) doesn’t leak and 2) keeps the coffee nice and hot. The downside is simple: it belongs to my girlfriend.

The travel mug is a sixteen ounce, “vacuum insulated” (whatever that means) Klean Kanteen. This particular one has a brushed stainless steel finish and has the Powell’s Books logo on the side as we picked it up at Powell’s Books when we went on our trip to Portland.

You can find plenty of pictures of this little travel thermos on the Klean Kanteen website, but I have to say I very highly recommend it. I have never found a thermos that keeps the coffee quite this hot; even with the lid off the fact that the walls are so well insulated means that up is the only way that heat will leak out of the coffee. In fact, I’ve often been surprised by picking it up after leaving it sitting on my disk with the lid off, the sides being completely cool to the touch, and yet the coffee inside still being very hot.

My only quibble about this thermos is that while it does have an opening in the lid to make it somewhat more useful on the go (hence why I think of it as a hybrid of a thermos and a mug) it doesn’t have many of the other features one might expect from such a device; specifically, I wish that it had a handle and a loop for a karabiner.

Other than that, and considering that I don’t actually commute with this thing, it really is pretty great.

Conclusion: highly recommended.