Why don’t hotels have mugs at breakfast

[Beardy]

I was going to put this under the grumble thread, but then decided I wanted to add a poll, so here’s a whole new thread for this very important issue.

Whe do hotels only have stupid little tea cups available for breakfast tea snd coffee? Just how many people actual drink their morning cuppa in a diddly tea cup? It’s bad enough that they force you to make your own cup of tea with luke warm water

[T42]

I use a bone china thing originally sold as a beer mug, for them as likes short measure.

It's true, what you say: most hotels I've been in have only supplied narsty little cups, but since hotel tea is so wretched I always drink coffee instead; hotel coffee is usually crap but can be greatly improved with hot milk.  That said, the café au lait I had out of the machine in the St. Dié Ibis in 2011 was bloody good.

[Regulator]

Many of the chain hotels (e.g. Travelodge) do have mugs...  I intensely dislike places that use silly little cups for coffee.

I must have at least two mugs of proper coffee before I can be approached in the morning.

[Woofage]

I make a pot off tea (with proper leaves) and drink the lot. Translated into cups that's probably 4. I share the OP's frustration.

[hatler]

^ ^ Snap.  ^ ^
Though I'm less religious about leaf tea (lovely though it is).

[Mr Larrington]

I don't drink tea of a morning.  Doubly so in USAnia, where I usually use my outsize travel mug as they tend to supply their Brown Drink in things that are:

• nasty disposable plastic, or
• titchy, or
• both

When on duty at Battle Mountain it then gets refilled and taken out to the course.  Bloody cold in that desert first thing in the morning.

[Kim]

I've voted with the coffee drinkers, because I eschew hot brown things, but at least coffee smells good.

Mugs though, useful things.  Dunno why they don't have them.

[L CC]

I think it's because their hot drinks aren't very hot. So by the time you got halfway down a mug it'd be cold.

I don't really do brown drinks so I used Mr Smith's vote.

[ravenbait]

Back when I was staying away a lot, I became so frustrated with the quality and quantity of beverages provided by the various hotels (which ranged from "can't sleep because pigeons are shagging on the windowsill three feet from my head and they can apparently do so without pause for rest or breath" to "I think the headboard is modelled on David Coulthard's chin") that I took to packing a ziploc baggie containing decent teabags, my favourite herbal tea for before bed, ground coffee, an aeropress or a V60, and instant hot chocolate. This was packed inside a titanium camping mug of a decent size and squirreled away in a corner of my bag by the underwear and running kit.

Sam

[ian]

Ah, the delights of Conference Coffee, a curiously homoeopathic brown fluid that pretends to be coffee, often brought to you by entities such as 'Starbucks' through some sponsorship agreement with the hotel. It's not exactly aiming high but it tastes like the memory of coffee for someone with late-stage Alzheimer's. Yet you drink it, mostly because you were still in the hotel bar at 4am and you're somehow trying to wash bits of the plastic pastry down your gullet while at the same time irrigating a brain that feels like the Sahara after a long dry spell. You will drink this until your kidneys protest and bladder strains and you run to the 'restroom' to urinate with the force of a thousand Niagaras.

[ravenbait]

The only Conference Coffee I have ever had comes supplied in giant thermos flasks operated by depressing a section of the lid, upon which a half-hearted stream of liquid the colour of manure leachate emerges into one's reluctantly proffered "mug" — really a cup disguised as a mug (and all are too thick, so one can't taste properly) — and releases a stench somewhere between burnt dung, soy sauce, and the solid lump that is left when one leaves a tin of instant espresso powder in a damp shed for two years. There will also be a similar flask pretending to hold hot water, but there is no use attempting to drink tea instead, as the combination of the "hot" water from the flask and one of the individually wrapped teabags produces a drink that tastes like someone invented a washing up liquid that smelled like your granny's underwear drawer, used it to wash your "mug", then didn't rinse afterwards.

I have learned to pack a couple of Lifesystems thermos flasks and make my own coffee using the aforementioned supplies and the hotel kettle, which at least can boil water effectively.

Sam

[ian]

Yes, it's sometimes dispensed from those thermos things, other times big urns. It's notable by the fact that it's a drink that has forgotten what coffee tastes like. Large US chain hotels are the worst but it's pretty universal at large conferences.

Never bother with tea, that hot water is the temperature of spit, you may as well just put the teabag in your mouth (NSFW in 3,2,1...).

[Kim]

Yes, it's sometimes dispensed from those thermos things, other times big urns.

They use the thermos things where it isn't likely to ruin someone's day if they manage to overload the ring main.

[ian]

They do seem to occasionally mount the urns over a sterno. This usually means the coffee was made in the late palaeocene.

[Pingu]

My heart sinks (or it did before The Event) when I see a thermos thing on a trolley with a mug of those small paper tubes of Nescafé (most of which turn out to be decaffeinated) beside it.

[ian]

In Ethiopia, we had a nice lady who came in made an elaborate coffee every afternoon, which was very nice. Or rather it wasn't, because, despite all the ceremony and effort, the coffee tasted like an accident in a Costa toilet.

[Mr Larrington]

The only Conference Coffee I have ever had comes supplied in giant thermos flasks operated by depressing a section of the lid, upon which a half-hearted stream of liquid the colour of manure leachate emerges into one's reluctantly proffered "mug" — really a cup disguised as a mug (and all are too thick, so one can't taste properly) — and releases a stench somewhere between burnt dung, soy sauce, and the solid lump that is left when one leaves a tin of instant espresso powder in a damp shed for two years.

As a description of the horble muck that masquerades as “coffee” in USAnian motels, diners and self-styled “Seattle's Best Coffee” airside outlets at Sea-Tac airport, that ^^^^ is unlikely to be surpassed in my lifetime.  I salute you.

I have learned to pack a couple of Lifesystems thermos flasks and make my own coffee using the aforementioned supplies and the hotel kettle, which at least can boil water effectively.

Hotel kettles are not A Thing in USAnia (though I've encountered a few in Canuckistan).  And the feeble excuse for electricity that they use in Leftpondia means your dual-vole travel kettle will heat up only slightly faster than the rest of the universe cools down.

[Mrs Pingu]

As a weak tea drinker the problem with the conference thermos things is the hot water invariably tastes vaguely of coffee.

I got so fed up of the tiny coffee cups on offer in Norway (both hotels and our office) that I took to packing my own tea bags (there was that time I found the office was keeping earl grey tea in the same container as apple, cinnamon and other such flavours, bleuch) and I bought a collapsible silicone camping mug which carries a full 350ml.

[rachel t]

My parents often travelled to Spain in the winter months & they used to pack 2 mugs that were passed their best & a plastic bag of best quailty british supermarket tea bags which they would take down to breakfast in the hotel, this was the only time of day that they drank tea & they couldn't stand liptons breakfast tea. Hot water was never a problem, The mugs never came home hence the reason they took the old ones from the cupboard.
On one trip a lady got chatting & was saying about the tiny cups & that she liked a good mug of tea in a morning & my mum said we just bring a couple of mugs with us. They got chatting again a few days later & the lady said she had been to a discount store & brought herself a mug to use & would be bringing one everytime she holidayed as it made such a difference.

[Feanor]

My main interaction with USAnian coffee was in the Main Mothership of my erstwhile employer.

Every office and lab had the same 1970-issue filter coffee machine.
They were covered in the same fake wood sticky-back plastic that covered everything else: the cars, houses, domestic pets; rendering all beige. I think there must be a world-wide shortage of beige by now.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with filter coffee.
But these things...
The SOP was to open a pack of 'coffee', and brew it up first thing. The stuff was piss-weak. But it then sat on the hotplate for the whole day, slowly stewing into a brown gloop of horrendousness. To make matters worse, because one jug would not last the day, these infernal contraptions had a *second* hotplate on the top, so you could brew two jugs and keep them both stewing all day.
Oh, and beside the machine would be a dish fill of sachets of milk-substitute-white-powder, whatever that might be.

The jugs themselves had become irredeemably dark brown, the brown gloop having absorbed into the very glass itself.

<shudder>

My US-hotel breakfast experiences have been either the hotplate-of-horrendousness or the umpy-pumpy thermos things mentioned earlier. These are invariable empty, and the umpy-pumping just produces a brown flatulence.  I can think of no place that these umpy-pumpy thermos things have a use, other than on a foldy-out table in the arse end of nowhere; audaxers, for the sustenance of.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Lipton tea bags are ubiquitous in some parts of Europe. I think the name suggests to people that they're drinking something very British. I'm not sure I've ever seen them in Britain. But there they are with their yellow labels perched on every saucer in every cafe from Athens to Helsinki and on every supermarket shelf from Lisbon to Lviv.

[Cudzoziemiec]

On coffee, my son was saying he had "Nescafe Quick" from a machine at work yesterday and he's never having it again. "What kind of pretend coffee is that?" I bet their machine doesn't have sticky-back plastic in imitation wood pattern though.

[perpetual dan]

I used to work in a place with a filter setup like Feanor. I was usually the first to need coffee (if you pay me to think, then time before coffee is a waste of money), so I got to wash up (a strange and unusual affectation it seemed) and to fill my mug while it was fresh. Unless no one had turned the hotplate off yesterday, when the remains were burnt to the jug - that needed soaking and paid for coffee!

[T42]

When on duty at Battle Mountain it then gets refilled and taken out to the course.  Bloody cold in that desert first thing in the morning.

I did one BCMF (mountain brevet) years ago where lunch, halfway down a long descent on a cold, wet day, was an icy-cold meal straight out of the fridge and the only hot drink was vile coffee out of a 5-litre percolator served in tiny plastic cups. On the next bit I got so cold that the bike got the shimmies from my arms shaking on the bars.

[ian]

My main interaction with USAnian coffee was in the Main Mothership of my erstwhile employer.

Every office and lab had the same 1970-issue filter coffee machine.
They were covered in the same fake wood sticky-back plastic that covered everything else: the cars, houses, domestic pets; rendering all beige. I think there must be a world-wide shortage of beige by now.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with filter coffee.
But these things...
The SOP was to open a pack of 'coffee', and brew it up first thing. The stuff was piss-weak. But it then sat on the hotplate for the whole day, slowly stewing into a brown gloop of horrendousness. To make matters worse, because one jug would not last the day, these infernal contraptions had a *second* hotplate on the top, so you could brew two jugs and keep them both stewing all day.
Oh, and beside the machine would be a dish fill of sachets of milk-substitute-white-powder, whatever that might be.

The jugs themselves had become irredeemably dark brown, the brown gloop having absorbed into the very glass itself.

<shudder>

My US-hotel breakfast experiences have been either the hotplate-of-horrendousness or the umpy-pumpy thermos things mentioned earlier. These are invariable empty, and the umpy-pumping just produces a brown flatulence.  I can think of no place that these umpy-pumpy thermos things have a use, other than on a foldy-out table in the arse end of nowhere; audaxers, for the sustenance of.

Yeah, this. I got our Virginia office to buy a 'European style' coffee robot to avoid the jug of filter coffee and the endless fights over someone not making a new brew (the standard MO of some miscreants was to leave a half cup in the jug and adjudge themselves not to have finished it). Those are the sort of people who turn into Trumpite Republicans or bring their guns to the office on a day that's not marked in the workplace calendar as Bring Your Guns to the Office Day. Early signs.

Basically, the only way to drink that stuff, is to brew it and drink, any coffee that sits on a hotplate turns to bilge (which is why my filter coffee decants into a thermos).

Also, the flavoured whitener, the hazelnut horror. Or the little pots of half-and-half. For the very gods, milk. It comes in quart bottles. It's fortified with vitamin D and the sort of hormones that make you literally horny. Buy one from the grocery store and put it in the fridge. Nor do I want coffee that professes to be Chock-Full-o'-Nuts (so are squirrels) or French Vanilla Roast. The other place you find all this stuff is the convenience store, along with the pressypressy pump-action thermoses. They will declare 'freshly brewed' though 'recently micturated' might be a better description.

Imitation wood is dying out though, there should be a campaign to save it, first it disappeared from the sides for continent-spanning Buick station wagons, now it's slowly disappearing everywhere. I had a toaster oven nicely decked out in the stuff.