How Often Should We Wash the Coffee Cup?

With the development of the manufacturing industry, the productivity of coffee cups has increased year by year. A large amount of people who like drinking coffee have many kinds of coffee cups, such as heat changing mugs, stainless steel cup, travel mug with handle, fine bone china mugs and so on. Here cons a question. Do you usually wash your coffee cup or seldom wash it? Generally speaking, some people regularly wash their office coffee cup, and the others only take it off their desk to cover up the crusted coffee stain at the bottom with a fresh pour, thinking that the heat must kill the germs or something.

We don't Have to Wash the Coffee Cup Regularly.

According to the report Heidi Mitchell wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column, it's fine to never wash your mug, as long as you're not sharing it with anybody else. Better than fine, it may actually be the most sanitary option. Besides, if you have many alternatives, you don’t have to wash it, either. For instance, custom printed mugs, bone china cups, leak proof travel mug, etc. are good products you can choose as your coffee cups.

There are two aspects we need to pay attention, infectious-disease expert Jeffrey Starke, a pediatrics professor at Baylor College of Medicine, told Mitchell. The first one is that it only applies if you're not sharing the mug with anybody else. And two, if you leave cream or sugar in the cup, after the weekend, the inside is likely to be moldy and you need to wash it.

Otherwise, though, there's not really much to worry about. Professor Starke said, “If you test an unwashed coffee cup, you can definitely find bacteria in it. But most of the bacteria come from the person who uses the cup.” If a person uses the same cup when he is sick, it also hardly causes re-infection through drinking. Because the virus does not survive outside the body for long.

Which means that just letting your mug unwashed may be a safer method instead of cleaning the cups with dirty communal sponges in the company kitchen. However, if you are using a coffee cup which is precious, such as red coffee cups, double walled coffee glasses, smart coffee cup and so on, you’d better wash it regularly. "The sponge in the break room probably has the highest bacteria count of anything in the office," Starke said. If the unwashed cup horrifies you, just stick the sponge in the microwave before using.

How to Wash Our Coffee Cups?

Some people still hold that we should wash our coffee cups regularly for the sake of our health. With the warming of the external climate and the humid indoor environment, bacteria are more likely to overflow. Biologists have also stated that Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and any number of oral bacteria may be present in unwashed cups. The following are simple steps to reduce bacteria in coffee cups:

1. After each use, please wash the cup with detergent and water.

2. Try to use paper towels instead of sponges to clean, otherwise E. coli and Salmonella may be put into the cup.

3. Dry the cup with a paper towel after cleaning.