Friends told us about the nifty Ember cups they had, and I got all excited. It’s a cup that keeps your coffee at a predetermined temperature. For a coffee sipper like me, that looked like something I had to have.
My wife bought it for me:
Here I am all excited when I received it:
It comes with the Ember app for my phone. In the app I can monitor its charge status and set default parameters like my preferred temperature. It also sends notifications when your coffee reaches the right temperature and other conditions.
When I first used it the next morning, I was all excited. My drip coffee maker keeps the temperature at 157° F. I learned that from the Ember app when I filled the cup from the coffee pot. The ideal default temperature in the Ember cup is 135° F. For the next while, the cup didn’t really do any warming, but it waited for the coffee to “cool” to 135° F. When it eventually got to that temperature, it sent a notification to my phone. Now here is the kicker: The battery life of the cup is about 80 minutes. By the time I was through my first cup of coffee for the day, I was down to about 30% battery capacity and the cup really hadn’t done any warming. The coffee just cooled all by itself. When I was ready for my second cup, the charge was gone and I had to put it back on the charger for an hour and a half.
After just drinking one cup of coffee, which, granted, never cooled below 135° F, I was left with a beautiful, heavy, copper-colored metal coffee cup that cost $160, and I experienced range-anxiety.
I came to the conclusion that the Ember cup is a solution to a problem that really does not exist, and with a charge capacity of only 80 minutes, not even an effective one. It’s a perfect white elephant, albeit an expensive one.
We returned the cup and I deleted the app.
Ha! We got it as a gift once. Used it once and tossed it with the move.
Yep. Used it once…. and said “Really?”