Cheap vs. expensive product breakdownfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

You can buy a metal cup on Amazon for $5. So why are people paying 300 for what is by every visible measure the same thing? A simple metal cup. Is the difference real or is this just rich people cope for a cup? This is chasing beauty episode 75 and today we're going inside the metal. Let's start with the $5 cup. It's stainless tier, an alloy of chromium iron and often nickel. It's the default material for anything metal that touches good. But stainless steel has a problem most people never think about. Pour hot coffee into a stainless steel cup. Wait ten minutes. There's a faint sharpness riding on the top flavor that wasn't there when you brewed it. That's metal ion leaching. Tiny amounts of iron and chromium migrating into the liquid, especially when it's hot or acidic. No, pick up the $300 cup. This is a SAS gallery titanous goblet. It's made from 99% pure titanium. The same metal used in jet turbines, surgical implants, and the chassis of satellites. And the first thing you'll notice is that it feels like it weighs nothing. A 400 milliliter Titanous weighs about a 140 grams. That's lighter than most phones. But light doesn't mean fragile. Titanium has one of the highest strength to weight ratios of any metallic element. And the most important part for a drinking vessel, it doesn't ionize. Your coffee tastes exactly the way the roaster intended. So why isn't every cup made of titanium? Because it's a nightmare to work with. Stainless steel is forgiving. Titanium cracks. It's so hard that standard tooling breaks against it. That's why it's found almost nowhere in everyday consumer good, which brings us to Tsubame. Tsubame is a small city in the Niigata Prefecture on the Sea Of Japan coast. Its metalworking tradition goes back over four hundred years to the early Edo period. SAS gallery is based in Tsubame. The company started in stainless steel vacuum containers. But at some point, the president became obsessed with a question. Can you build a vacuum insulated double wall tumbler out of pure titanium? No one had done it. You need two perfectly formed walls of titanium, an inner cup and an outer shell with a sealed vacuum between them. Every step that's routine with stainless steel becomes a research project with titanium. It took years of trial and error, but they figured it out. The Titaness became the world's first vacuum insulated double wall titanium tumbler. So what does the double wall vacuum actually do? Pour an ice cold matcha into the tumbler. The outside stays room temperature. No condensation. No wet ring on your table. Meanwhile, the drink inside stays dramatically colder than it would in a single wall cup because there's literally nothing between the walls to conduct heat. Your $5 Amazon cup, a single wall of stamped tier, condensation everywhere, burns your hands with hot drinks. So is this ridiculous? A $300 cup for drinking better? Maybe. But it's also a cup you'll use every single day for the rest of your life. Titanium doesn't degrade. It doesn't rust. One is disposable metal. The other is the last cup you'll ever need.