How much does a ceramic mug weigh?

An empty ceramic mug — the kind that lives in a kitchen cupboard, nothing poured into it — weighs about 264 grams. That figure came off our own bench, for a standard-size mug of the sort most people would reach for first.

Capacity has less to do with a mug's weight than wall thickness does. A thin bone-china mug can hold as much coffee as a chunky stoneware one and still weigh a third less, because the extra grams in a heavy mug are almost entirely in the clay, not the coffee it holds. Fill this mug and the total climbs further: coffee is close enough to water that its weight in grams roughly matches its volume in millilitres, so a full mug typically adds another 200 to 300 grams on top of the empty weight above.