Cup Match

Find the cup you'll actually reach for

Most cups that end up at the back of a cupboard are there for a physical reason: the handle pinches, it is too heavy full, it does not fit the dishwasher, or the drink is cold before you finish it. Three questions, and the answers filter on those measurements rather than on style.

Five stoneware cups of different shapes and sizes arranged in a row

What you drink
Your hand
What bugs you
Cups

What do you drink?

Espresso60–150 ml, no milk or barely anyCoffee with milkFlat white, cappuccino, latteBlack coffeeFilter, French press, americanoTeaBagged, loose leaf or herbalSomething big400 ml and up, or broth

The filters are hard

Saying your drink goes cold returns only cups with a wall of 8 mm or more, or a genuine double wall. Saying handles pinch returns only openings of 32 mm or more. Saying you prefer no handle returns only cups with no handle. These are filters over recorded numbers, not weightings — a cup that fails one cannot be pushed back in by scoring well elsewhere.

Cooling is a comparison, not a promise

Ceramic has no vacuum layer. A thicker wall cools more slowly than a thin one, and that is the whole of the effect — none of these cups keep a drink hot the way a vacuum flask does. How we measure it.

It may return nothing

Some combinations have no answer — a handleless cup with a wide handle opening, for instance. When that happens the tool says so instead of relaxing a filter quietly and showing you something that does not fit.