The Ember Mug

I will start this review by saying I would never buy this product full-price out of my own pocket. I was gifted my Ember Mug by family as a birthday gift.

The mug will keep your brew of choise at the temperature you configure it for. I like my coffee at 54 degrees Celsius (129 ºF), and the mug will keep it at that as long as there is liquid in it and it’s on the charging plate. If I bring the mug with me on a meeting, it most often run out of battery by the end of a one hour meeting. Most of the time though, I’m at my desk with the mug on the plate and sip on my 54 ºC coffee from 09:30 until lunch at around 11:30.

I bought a USB-PD adapter from Amazon to be able to plug the charging plate in whatever PD-compatible charger I got with me, so I just have to bring the mug, the plate and the cable. The power brick the mug comes with is relatively huge.

Pros

• The volume. 4 dl (14 oz) is plenty of coffee.
• Always perfect temperature.
• The coffee doesn’t get that bitterness it gets when microwaving cold coffee.
• There are FOSS implementations of the app. My mug is connected to my Home Assistant instance when I’m home.
• The Bluetooth is a bonus and is not required after setup.

Cons

• The companion app is soo bad. You configure the mug and delete the app.
• The charging plate is proprietary and is powered by a 19 Volt power brick with a barrel connector. For a mug with Bluetooth, this feels oddly outdated.
• Did I mention the outdated barrel connector and power brick?
• The Bluetooth is…brittle. I am only able to connect my laptop to the mug if I press the pairing-button on the mug. This might not be the mugs fault though. I would prefer BLE for this novelty use-case though, so you can skip the whole pairing shenaniganz.

FOSS companion

There is 3rd party support for the mug in Home Assistant, and at work I use the script below to check battery level and temperature. I had an idea of hooking it up to notifyd to get a notification when the mug reaches 54 ºC or the battery runs low, but the connections is too unreliable for me to invest time into setting it up.

git clone https://github.com/sopelj/python-ember-mug.git

sudo pacman -S extra/python-pipx
cd python-ember-mug
pipx install .

ember-mug info