Zojirushi SM-SD36 BC Stainless Steel Mug, 12-Ounce, Silky Black

Zojirushi SM-SA48-BA Stainless Steel Mug, Black, 16-OunceFirst, I don't write reviews often, but feel compelled to do so. I can't stop telling people about this little gem! I was using a Contigo autoseal style cup and was happy with it. It kept my coffee hot for 4-6 hours if left full all day. If I drank say half of it, the temperature would hold closer to 4 hours. That is to be expected. It was my favorite cup as it kept my coffee hot and it was my only spill proof travel mug. Sure I have a dozen insulated coffee mugs, but none that I could put in a bag or throw on the leather seat of my Lexus and not worry about it spilling.Well, I dropped the Contigo cup shortly after purchase and it dented in the side pretty good, but its function was fine. After about six months it started leaking after another drop and the plastic threads of the lid cracked and could no longer hold a seal. So, I was back on the hunt for a new travel mug. I roast my own coffee and am pretty particular when it comes to my coffee. I literally have spent thousands on coffee and espresso equipment. It would be considered an addiction. Needless to say, I like to have my addiction hot and often. Kind of reminds me of my wife! Similarly, I get irritable if you decrease my enjoyment of either of these addictions. So, needless to say, the cup needed to be replaced asap.So, I go to Amazon and find the Contigo Autoseal and put it into the cart. Prime baby, I'll have it in a couple days. Hey, what is that in the recommended products. A Zojirushi SM-SA48-BA Stainless Steel Mug, interesting, six months earlier I had researched bread making machines and turns out Zojirushi makes the best one, I bought it and we have been very impressed with its thoughtful design and quality. A few months later I broke my thermal pitcher I pour my french press brew into immediately after extraction. So here I go to Amazon and similar story, I purchase a Zojirushi thermal pitcher and it was also a great product. So the Zojirushi SM-SA48-BA Stainless Steel Mug caught my eye. Wow, 1100+ reviews and 5 star rating. You don't see that too often. $26 dollars compared to the Contigo $15, hmm, that's a lot. I will just order both.Now, to say that I am impressed with this little gem is an understatement. At first look on Amazon, I didn't like the design. The flip lid seems like it would be a pia. Always having to flip to take a drink, when I was used to the Contigo and just pushing the button and taking a drink. A few reviewers also stated they hit their nose on the lid. I really didn't think I would like it, but what the hey, I'll give it a try. The package arrived as expected with the two cups, I attached a picture with a soda can so you can compare the two products.First impressions:Form - They both look really good as far as form factor. I got the white Contigo, because it was $12 compared to $15 and up for other colors. Not considering colors, I like the look of the Zojirushi. I believe this is a more of a personal preference issue. So pretty close just looking at them.Design -The Zojirushi really pulls ahead in this department. When you pick up these mugs up out of the box, you will immediately lean towards the Zojirushi. As you can see in the pictures, compared to a soda can the Contigo is a bit larger in diameter and the Zojirushi is a little smaller. My hands are on the smaller side of a male hand and the Contigo feels big. Kind of like picking up a soda can compared to a two liter soda bottle. The soda can feels more comfortable in your hand. This is an exaggeration, but it is the accurate way you will feel when comparing the two. The Zojirush, just has a nicer hand feel. It is comfortable to hold in a relaxed position. Like the 2 liter bottle, the Contigo took more effort to hold.The Contigo wins when it comes to getting coffee from the mug into your mouth quickly, but hold on. If you are a coffee drinker, like me, who enjoys the experience of drinking coffee. The mouth feel of the cup, the aroma of the coffee as you inhale through your nose taking that first air infused slurping sip. The best environment for this experience is a good warmed open ceramic or porcelain mug. Short of that, every other form is a compromise. The mouth feel of the mug, the openness as you tilt the mug to inhale the aroma, and the ability to sip with a slurping type sip where you take in a little air with the liquid to enhance your ability to taste the subtle rich notes of the coffee. This is where the Zojirushi shines, as it simulates the porcelain mug the best.When I was like you, reading the reviews, this didn't occur to me, until I took my first sip from the Zojirushi. Again, the flip lid seemed to be less efficient way than the Contigo, and maybe it is, but the advantages to coffee enjoyment are great. Here is why, think about drinking out of the Contigo. It is like drinking out of a straw. You suck from the little hole at the edge of the lid and there is no air exchange, like sucking out of a straw. Think about drinking a beer out of a straw, you lost the joy of drinking the beer, but you got your alcohol. The Conitgo was the same way, but at the time was worth having a spilless cup of hot coffee. You got your caffeine, but lost the joy of the cup. You comprimise on mouth feel, air exchange with the slurp and aroma of the coffee, but you get hot and spilless.The Zojirushi, on the other hand, has less compromise in these areas. Due to the flip lid, they were able to design a drinking rim similar to drinking from a cup with enough room for plenty of aroma to escape and you can slurp as you take a drink. So, this design allows you to enjoy your coffee to the fullest, even in a travel mug. No, you are not sitting on the porch with comfy clothes and sluping on a warm mug of deliciousness, but you are getting the best coffee drinking environment I have found in travel form.The other impressive thing on design, this thing can keep your coffee hot all day long. The Contigo will keep a full mug of coffee hot for about 6 hours. About 4 hours if you only fill it half way or drink half. The Zojirushi really shines here also, I put coffee from my french press into this little gem at 8 am and drank from it all day and that evening at 6pm, ten hours later, the last drink was drinking temperature, not just lukewarm. Wow, I was impressed.Another note, I can fit the Zojirushi in my back pocket of my jeans or fit it into the inside jacket pocket, where the Contigo is just too fat to make that work.Needless to say, make this purchase and just enjoy your coffee. If you drink Folgers coffee, disregard everything I have said, as you just won't understand.This is one of those stupid things, but I am so impressed and this is one of those products that has literally made my life a little more enjoyable and I appreciate it!

This travel mug is awesome. It really performed beyond my expectations in regards to keeping beverages hot. I made a cup of hot coffee at 9 PM one night and at 5 AM I went to take a sip and it was still very, very hot. I was stunned literally as I expected it to be lukewarm. I can honestly say I’ve been using it consecutively and it has kept my coffee hot for 7 to 8 hours. Don’t know if the temperature has anything to do with it, but where I reside is currently spring with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s. I am getting a second one for my cold water. Now this freaked me out ..I put water that was barely above room temperature in it as I was traveling out the house and about 45 minutes later when I went to take a sip, the water was colder than what I put in there. I don’t understand how that was possible, but I was pleasantly pleased and although it doesn’t hold any coffee smell after I wash it. I’m getting a second one to use for water only. I highly recommend purchasing this product.. It’s well worth its price!

I was not satisfied with the performance of my travel coffee mugs, so I set out to find one that would keep my coffee hot for as long as possible. I gathered together a variety of travel hot beverage containers from my own personal collection as well as any others I could borrow. Some that I found do a remarkable job of retaining heat. Presumably, these same containers will be remarkable at keeping beverages cold as well. Don’t want to get into the thermodynamics of it, but at room temperature, the change in temperature from hot to ambient is always faster and more noticeable than the change from ice cold to ambient.OK, so I wanted to do something more than just a subjective comparison of different containers. It doesn’t do much to say my coffee is warm, hot, or scalding after 3 hours, so I decided to do a quantitative temperature comparison. First I filled them with boiled water, and then measured the temperatures over 24 hours or more. I’m uploading the results in tables and graphs. See for yourself how each one performs over several hours. The comparison includes some generic double-walled cups that might only be insulated with Styrofoam, or maybe even just air. These were grouped together as the worst performers. The best performers were the vacuum wall stainless steel cups. These were somewhat similar in performance, but there were a few that were much better than others.I recently bought a Contigo, 20 oz. vacuum wall stainless steel travel cup with a screw-on top with a pop-up opening. Nice, and much better than anything I was using at the time. Then I heard about the acclaimed performance of Zojirushi travel cups, so thought I’d try one. In short, it was amazing. If possible, it was too good, because if I filled it with hot coffee straight from the coffee pot, I ended up with coffee that was too hot to drink for at least 3 hours. Yes, I heard that complaint from other reviewers, but didn’t believe it. It’s true.Maybe not too surprisingly, one of my oldest thermos bottles was the best performer. Unfortunately, it has a vacuum glass liner and a very small opening. That makes it somewhat undesirable to use for travel or carry.Overall comments: Zojirushi containers are great at heat retention, and they are beautiful. Also, the Life Sky UQTOGB is a beautiful deep red. Life Sky says it’s red, and you better believe it’s really red, unlike the Zojirushi that claims to be red, but is really a rose or pink color. The Life Sky does not leak, even when the top is loose. The top seal is different from the similar style Zojirushi The Life Sky seal is wider that the Zoji seal, and as a result of that, the seal tightens down when the top is turned only a half-turn, and forms a leak-proof seal. If the Life Sky top is tightened too much, it gets to be very hard to loosen later. Tighten it just enough to be leak-proof, and it’s much easier to open later. Zojirushi containers do not leak, and the tops are easy to turn, but because of the thinner seal, they need to be tighter. Some reviewers say they have trouble with the Zojirushi SM-YAE48-GA, but I have had no problem at all. This one did not leak, and like the Life Sky, the seal is thicker, so the characteristics are similar.Separately, I compared a few stainless steel “sports bottles” which have screw-on tops, but do not have any pop-up covers for drinking. These are from Life Sky, Geysa, Glacier Point, and Simply Simily. Simply Simily and Glacier Point bottles were larger in size, but not so much larger in volume. They were better at heat retention, presumably because they have more space between the walls. The Life Sky and Geysa bottles were almost identical, the main difference is that the Geysa bottle has a highly polished exterior. It did not perform any better than the Like Sky bottle, which is about half the price. The screw tops were so similar that they were interchangeable between the Glacier Point, Like Sky, and Geysa bottles.One thing I noticed will all, is that at the top where there is no vacuum wall, they all get warm.These comparisons were run at 3 separate times. Once with 10 different cups of varied construction. Then 2 more times, keeping the groups among cups with similar designs.Update 3/16/16: I'm not happy with the way my graphics uploaded to this review. The original was high resolution, but Amazon reduced the size to the point that it's unreadable. So here's some raw data. These are temperatures vs elapsed time in hours & minutes. The column headings are numbered, and the number key is below the temperature data. If you look at the heat loss vs time, the best performer was an old glass-lined vacuum thermos jar with a loss of 54 deg at 19 hrs, 30 min. Second place was the Zojirushi at a loss of 61 deg at the same time.Watch for more reviews to be added to some other travel vacuum bottles.Hot Beverage Container Temperature (F.) vs. TimeHrs Min 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 100 0 190 181 181 179 174 165 159 168 165 1740 40 186 168 177 168 143 132 125 138 136 1681 5 185 165 176 163 134 120 114 127 123 1672 5 177 158 172 150 107 98 95 107 104 1632 30 176 154 170 147 102 93 91 100 96 1613 15 172 149 167 140 96 84 82 91 89 1594 0 167 145 165 132 87 70 70 82 75 15611 30 140 114 145 96 66 62 62 64 64 13119 30 118 93 127 86 11329 30 100 80 111 75Hot Beverage Container Heat Loss (F.) vs. TimeHrs Min 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 40 -4 -13 -4 -11 -31 -33 -34 -30 -29 -61 5 -5 -16 -5 -16 -40 -45 -45 -41 -42 -72 5 -13 -23 -9 -29 -67 -67 -64 -61 -61 -112 30 -14 -27 -11 -32 -72 -72 -68 -68 -69 -133 15 -18 -32 -14 -39 -78 -81 -77 -77 -76 -154 0 -23 -36 -16 -47 -87 -95 -89 -86 -90 -1811 30 -50 -67 -36 -83 -108 -103 -97 -104 -101 -4319 30 -72 -88 -54 -93 -6129 30 -90 -101 -70 -104Brand1 Subzero camp thermos2 Thermos Food jar3 Thermos glass-lined bottle4 Contigo travel vacuum bottle5 COPCO6 BODUM7 Starbucks8 Holland America9 Generic10 Zojirushi SM-SA48-NM

This an outstanding thermos that I use for my coffee daily. The overall matte finish and size make it sleek and easy to carry. As other reviewers have mentioned, your coffee stays hot to the point where it's undrinkable lol. The top is truly leak proof and the locking mechanism is a nice feature. As for durability, the bottom edge has some small signs of wear here and there but nothing that you'd notice in daily use. The top is easily disassembled for cleaning and the rubber gasket still looks new after a few months. It was slightly concerning to see a cancer warning label, but I threw that out and will hope for the best.