Don't wash that coffee mug!

The last entry there under “Real Life”:

Somehow a tradition arose in the US Navy that neither coffee makers nor drinking mugs should ever be cleaned. This supposedly made the coffee more palatable (or rather, less unpalatable) then it would otherwise be. Possibly this was from a time when poor water quality and lowest-bidder coffee meant that the coffee would be bad no matter what you did. In any event, the result was a bad but consistent flavor that sailors grew used to.

I also like the (attributed) Lincoln quotation there:

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

Have fun drinking mold and other tastier stuff.

Here’s a sea story about coffee for you: On missile submarines, there is a massive coffee percolator in the crew’s mess that is rarely shut down (or cleaned). It’s supposed to be cleaned periodically, but in practice, when it runs low, they just add coffee and start the brew cycle again.

The other thing that U.S. missile submarines have is two crews. Every 3-4 months, they swap out, and the other crew takes the boat out. The crews are referred to as the “Gold” and “Blue” crews, and there is some friendly rivalry between the crews.

So anyway, the Gold crew on a particular missile sub was pretty sure that the Blue crew never cleaned the coffee percolator in the crew’s mess, and to prove it, they threw an old, used, steel-toed boat in the percolator before turning over the boat to the next crew. :smiley:

As the story goes, when they got the boat back 4 months later, the boot was still in the percolator, after being cooked for the entire time. Reportedly not much was left of the boot. :eek:

The glazing on my mug at work is all crackled. Seems like coffee rinses right out. Tea is difficult to wipe out even with the damp paper towel trick that I’ve found to work pretty well. All the crackle lines on the inside are brown, and I’m pretty sure it’s from tea. I figure it keeps other people from using it (shared office).

Yeah, I have no trouble with coffee staining mugs. It’s tea that really stains them and requires a scouring pad to clean. The same goes for teeth, I stopped drinking tea on a regular basis because it was yellowing them.

(Although, thinking about it, is it possible this has something to do with using cream in coffee, but not in tea? Perhaps the staining compounds are fat-soluble or something like that. Are the people who have trouble with coffee stains drinking it black?)

That’s because I added that entry after reading this thread. :slight_smile: