The Travel Buddy is a tea travel mug so you can take your tea on the road with you. It’s made of plastic, with a infuser basket that sits inside the mug, allowing you to steep tea on the go.

How does the Travel Buddy work? It’s quite simple. The bottom of the mug can be unscrewed so that you can pull out the infuser basket and fill it with your tea leaves (or a tea bag).

There are a few good points and bad points about the Travel Buddy, which I have outlined below.

The Positives

The infuser basket is another major benefit of the Travel Buddy. If you’re used to using tea leaves, these fit nicely in there; though you do have to be careful with oolong teas and any other tea that expands — there isn’t much room for expansion. I personally recommend using it for black teas and small leaf green teas, such as Longjing.

The infuser has tiny holes, which means that very few leaf particles escape into the drink itself. It even works for rooibos teas, which are composed of tiny, needle-like leaves.

If you screw the top and bottom on correctly — and tightly — the Travel Buddy doesn’t leak. But please note that I’ve only owned it for about a month; sometimes, mugs start leaking after a few months of use, as the thread thins.

The Negatives

My major problem with the Travel Buddy is that it is made from thin plastic, which gets very hot when you fill it with boiling water. Because it doesn’t have a handle, you have to hold the mug itself. As a result, I find myself waiting till it’s cooled down quite a bit before drinking the tea.

Ironically, the thin plastic also releases the heat quicker than other mugs do. The tea stays hot for about 30 – 40 minutes.

One way of overcoming this would be to buy a Travel Buddy jacket as well, which would allow you to touch it and also retain the heat a bit better.

There are plenty of alternatives on the market, many of which I reviewed in my article about tea travel mugs [http://teafinelybrewed.com/blog/tea-travel-mugs/]. Anyone interested in buying