The mug I drink from every morning weighs almost a pound. This is, on paper, too much for a mug. In practice, it is the only weight I want from a mug — the kind that tells you, when you pick it up, that you are picking it up. The East Fork Mug is heavy in the way that a good knife is heavy: not because it has too much in it, but because it has the right amount.
It holds twelve ounces of coffee. The handle is large enough for two fingers and small enough not to look it. The glaze is a soft eggshell with brown speckle, and it has, in three years, chipped exactly once — at the rim, where I knocked it against the faucet, and which I now think of as the place I knocked it against the faucet.
What it replaced
It replaced, in order: a Yeti Rambler I had for the wrong reasons, a thin diner mug that broke; a beautiful but small Heath ceramic that I gave to my sister; and four printed mugs from four different conferences that I do not need to tell you about. The East Fork was the heaviest of all of them. It is, by a long way, the one I picked up the most.
You don't need eight mugs. You need one mug, eight times a day.
The small case
A heavy mug warms your hand on a cold morning. A heavy mug does not slide on a desk. A heavy mug does not float on top of a sink full of dishes. A heavy mug, finally, sounds right when you set it down — a sound that is not loud, but is solid. Most things you buy do not have a sound. The ones that do, you keep.