We all have our vices in life … mine is coffee.  Three healthy cups in the morning, or I’m pretty much useless to anyone.  When things are going crazy, I blow through the java pretty quick, but if things are progressing at a manageable pace, I might linger a little longer over a cup – long enough for the damned thing to get cold.

Now, most of us would just walk to the microwave and zap some life back into it, but that’s not good enough for a group of German scientists who’ve founder a better way – a smart mug!

The idea came to the researchers at the Christmas market in the Bavarian town of Rosenhiem. “We got upset because the mulled wine” – Glühwein, in German — “was always either too hot or too cold,” say Klaus Sedlbauer, the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP), and his colleague Herbert Sinnesbichler. “We had to find a solution.”

They hollowed out a standard mug and inserted phase change material, which melts at a desired temperature and acts as a thermal stabilizer.

The material absorbs the warmth of the mug’s content like a sponge, stores it and brings it down to the optimal temperature. And then the PCM helps maintain the content’s temperature at this optimal level by slowly releasing the stored heat back into the mug’s contents. “Under ideal circumstances,” Sedlbauer says, “the optimal temperature can be maintained for 20-30 minutes.”

In order to even further insulate the mug and permit less heat to be lost, the outside part of the mug’s hollowed-out cavity — that is, the part farthest from the material whose temperature needs to be maintained — is lined with a razor-thin layer of either plastic or ceramics. This helps further ensure that the contents of the mug only start cooling down once the PCM has released all of its stored thermal energy and returned to a solid state.

Because the material holds the liquid at exactly the right temperature over time, it can be used to optimize a drinking experience.  Need your beer at exactly 44.6 °F?  No problem – just design the mug for the precise temperature and it’ll do the rest.  Of course, since any one mug will only hold liquid at one particular temperature, you’ll need a whole collection, but hey – that’s what the dishwasher is for, right?