W&P Ceramic Mug Review

Some people prefer the taste and feel of drinking their morning cup of coffee or tea from a mug instead of a travel container. That might be because even the best travel mug sometimes lends a metallic taste to your drink, in addition to potentially unwanted flavors from a plastic lid. Unfortunately, ceramic, pottery, and glass are all pretty breakable, so they don’t make the greatest containers for taking your tasty beverage on the go.

W&P aims to solve that issue with the Ceramic Mug, which is wrapped in a silicone sleeve to protect it from cracks and shattering if it falls. It also includes a BPA-free plastic lid to keep your drink inside the mug instead of spilling over as you power-walk to the bus stop. Will it be the one we turn to each morning? Let’s find out.

The Rundown

You can get the W&P Ceramic Mug in 12- and 16-ounce sizes. Normally, we’d be all about the biggest option, but we weren’t unhappy testing the smaller one in this case. That’s because the durable ceramic mug is not insulated, so your coffee, tea, or matcha will cool naturally instead of staying hot for hours. Our tester hoovers up coffee at an alarmingly fast rate in the morning, so she didn’t mind that, but you’ll want to keep that in mind if you’re looking for something to keep your drink hot or warm for hours. This isn’t it.

Even our quick-sipping tester isn’t sure she could drink 16 ounces of coffee fast enough to finish it before it cools. That’s why we’re happy with the shorter option. On the other hand, the W&P Ceramic Mug is microwave safe, so you can warm it up if it cools too quickly, something you can’t say about a metal coffee tumbler.

However, as our dinged-up casserole dishes can attest, ceramic can chip, crack, and break if faced with an impact from the floor or a granite countertop. So W&P has wrapped the Ceramic Mug in a matte silicone sleeve, which, we can attest, at least saved our sample from a fall to the wood kitchen floor. The silicone is soft to the touch, though it can be a little hot right after you pour in a boiling liquid, like the silicone cover on your cast-iron pan still gets pretty warm when you cook with it on. You can still touch it; it just might be warmer than you imagined.

There’s also a small hole on the bottom of the sleeve so that you can push the ceramic mug out if you want to wash it separately. When you fill the mug with hot water for your afternoon tea, it creates a hole-shaped dot of condensation on the surface you set it on, as the heat escapes faster from that open hole than from the silicone sleeve. So you’ll want to use a coaster on surfaces that can’t get damp.

Another note about this sleeve: We have the Terrazzo Charcoal colorway, which is a deep gray mug wrapped in a silicone sleeve speckled with other colors, like a terrazzo floor. There are three of these Terrazzo options available, as well as six solid colors. The problem is, at least with our sample, the silicone isn’t cut cleanly at the top, so there are jagged edges where different specks of colors didn’t cut like the base charcoal color did. You’ll get the idea if you’ve ever mown a wet lawn and gone back to see patches of long grass sprinkled throughout because they bent under the blade instead of getting cut.

We contacted W&P and were told that this was just a defect with our brand sample and that it isn’t indicative of the rest of the product line. That makes sense, as we wouldn’t think a company would continue to sell a product prone to such problems. However, it does make us slightly concerned about recommending the speckled colorways. To be safe, we’d go with a solid.

Whichever option you choose, the top of the mug has a nice, rounded lip so you can drink from it comfortably when you want an open container. However, if you’re using this as a travel mug, there’s also a press-on BPA-free plastic lid with a built-in slider to open and close as you drink. The slider works well and clicks into place, and it’s also comfortable to drink from this lid. It’s not leakproof but resists spills and splashes in everyday use.

Along with being OK to use in the microwave, the mug and lid are dishwasher safe, too, and there aren’t many parts to disassemble for cleaning, so it’s easy to do daily.

Packability

The 12-ounce W&P Ceramic Mug is a good width for most cup holders and bottle pockets. However, it’s not always easy to get out of them because of its height. The 4.4-inch (11 cm) height of the 12-ounce model is about the same height as the pockets on our daypack and only slightly taller than the cup holder in our car, so it can be hard to grab on the go. In this case, going with the 5.5-inch (14 cm) tall 16-ounce mug might be the better option. It’s also easier to pull it out of cup holders that are simple open slots than ones with silicone liners, which require more effort to pull the mug out.

Neither size is very heavy, although, as you can see from our specs at the top of this page, it weighs nearly as much empty as it can hold when full, so that isn’t the best size to weight ratio. On the other hand, it’s definitely lighter than some other travel mugs we’ve tested.

Quick Comparison

Speaking of the competition, we thought the Owala SmoothSip Slider (12 oz) and the Purist Collective Maker 10 oz Mug seemed the perfect options to compare with the W&P Ceramic Mug.

Spoiler alert: both those mugs are insulated, which means that both keep your drink hot or warm for longer than the W&P. On the other hand, our tester has burned her mouth several times on both of those mugs after taking a sip from them a little while after filling them with tea, so sometimes crazy good insulation isn’t the best option.

The W&P Ceramic Mug is also not stainless steel like those two options, so you can microwave it. You also might like the taste of your drink better when drinking from it than from the other two. The Purist Collective Maker Mug has a microscopic glass coating inside the container to keep your drink from touching (and, therefore, tasting like) metal, but the Owala SmoothSip Slider lacks that feature.

The Purist Collective also has a leak-proof lid, though you have to twist it open to drink, which isn’t as easy to do one-handed as the sliders on the W&P and the Owala. The SmoothSip Slider’s lid, however, is easy to open one-handed and leakproof.

All of that said, what makes the W&P Ceramic Mug right for you or not is right in the name: “ceramic.” If you don’t mind a lack of insulation and you’d rather drink from ceramic on the go, it might be a good option. We just recommend foregoing a speckled sleeve, to be on the safe side.