Thoughts on Thermal Bottles

A couple of years ago I pickup up a cheapie Ozark Trail thermos bottle a my local Wal-Mart. I wasn't too impressed with it then, and for that matter, I'm still not all that fond of it. It has a push button lid that is prone to leaking, the occasional burn, and it leaks its heat off fairly quickly.
Fast forward to the last week of 2009. I'm at Academy Sports and they have the Stanley Classic Thermos (1.1qt) on sale for $17. Cheap enough, I thought, so I bought it. The "Classic" designation hearkens back to Grandpa's or Dad's old thermos bottle. My Dad had one once upon a time. I used to go coon hunting with him when I was a kid. It gets cold out in the woods at night, and if a boy wants to warm up, he had better learn to like coffee. I did. As I got bigger, I understood what hot really was. Camp coffee is almost exclusively percolated. My Dad's Stanley was really good at keeping its contents scalding hot for hours out in the cold.
I had high expectations for my new copy. Unfortunately, expectations are sometimes more of pipe dream than reality. I had a nostalgic remembrance of scalding my tongue on a cold winter night on coffee that was brewed several hours earlier. To be honest, the first use of this thermos was on an extremely cold day. The high was in the neighborhood of 25 degrees. At night the temperature fell down to the high teens. I used a pot and Maxwell House Filter Packs to brew the coffee. I am careful not to boil the coffee. Boiling it just ruins the flavor. I still like it as hot as I can get it, though. When it was sufficiently brewed I poured the coffee into the new Stanley and tested the results a short time later. This day I had to settle for warm coffee. It was probably around 140-150 degrees. I had no way of knowing for sure, I just knew that it was turning to ice crystals before I got to the bottom of my cup. Suspicions were raised.
Well, to satisfy my curiosity I tested the thermos this morning. The thermos itself had sat inside overnight, so it was at room temperature. The coffee coming out of my French Press was a toasty 190 degrees. I poured the coffee in and waited for an hour. After one hour the Stanley Classic had bled off 25 degrees of heat . My house was 68 degrees hardly cold enough to be a test for a thermos. Twenty-five degrees is a considerable heat loss, especially in just one hour. Stanley bills this thermos as being able to keep liquids hot for 24 hours. I'm not exactly sure what their definition of hot is, but I speculate that after 24 hours my coffee would be closer to iced coffee than hot coffee. I plan on taking the thermos back to Academy and trying another. If that one deliver similar results, I'll know that the first example was faulty and I'll modify the review at that point.

Stanley Classic 1.1qt Thermos Bottle: Junk.