One of my best purchases of 2020
Bought this for my husband for Christmas since he loves drinking tea throughout the day at work, but I was so excited for him to be able to start using it that I gave it to him as soon as it arrived in early November! He absolutely LOVES this tea bottle and has probably thanked me over fifteen times over the past few months for finding it for him! He said it's one of the best gifts he has ever received and he has used it every single day since he got it.It's easy enough to clean -- not dishwasher safe but not hard to wash by hand. It's a manageable size to be able to scrub with a bottle brush and I've thrown the infuser basket in the dishwasher many times with no problem. But definitely I'd say err on the side of caution and hand wash the lid and bottle.The tea infuser basket is made of a very fine mesh which is awesome for finer loose leaf teas (and obviously also works well with larger loose leaf teas). We have used it with the very fine CTC tea and it has done an excellent job of not letting too many fine particles through, although usually there are a few floating around in the bottom of the container so he usually dumps out the very last sip. It doesn't let ANYTHING from the larger loose leaf Earl Gray blend that we use through, which is to be expected since the mesh is so fine.As for leak proof, it can be finicky. I personally wouldn't risk it and store this bottle upside down full of tea next to anything valuable, but that's just me. We've found that the rubber seal in the lid has come out a few times over the past few months -- it's easy enough to pop back in to the groove where it belongs but because it has a tendency to pop out it can also sometimes be hard to get a really tight seal when closing the bottle. Usually there no problem but there have been a few times where I've had to unscrew and then rescrew it back on because it didn't feel like it was going on quite right the first time. So far we haven't had many problems with it leaking but because of it's tendency to not always screw on the best I usually make sure that it's always in an upright position just to avoid potential tea spillage.As for holding a temperature, this thing is AWESOME! I used to make my husband tea every morning before his commute to work but it would always be so hot he wouldn't be able to drink it without putting a few ice cubes in to cool it down. That turned out to be a problem because the inside dimension of the bottle is more narrow than our ice cubes so I'd have to smash up our ice cubes to fit in the bottle to cool down the tea. Needless to say, that was a huge pain in the butt. Luckily I found that if I made the tea at night right before I went to bed and then stuck the bottle in the fridge it would be the perfect temp for him to drink on his way to work in the morning. It would still be hot but just cool enough that it was drinkable -- without adding ice! So even after spending about eight hours in a refrigerator this thing keeps hot liquids hot. No complaints there at all!I really like the wood grain design -- it's cool, natural, rugged-looking and my husband loves it! I think if I were to get one for myself I would go with the French Granite because I also find that design very beautiful and elegant, but honestly no matter which design you decide to go with you'll be getting a quality product that looks just as good as it functions.I also really like the moveable handle on the infuser basket -- it lays down flat, out of the way, so that the top can screw on with no issue with the infuser basket in place. I've also found that I can brew a second mug of tea with the infuser basket (our tea is strong enough that you can easily get two to three cups from about 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of loose leaf in the basket) by draping the handle over a reusable straw and resting the straw on the top of the mug. You could just drop the infuser basket into the mug if you don't want to use a straw, but I've found it much easier to just raise and remove the basket with the straw instead of fishing it out of the boiling water by hand. The convenient handle makes containing the basket where I want it to be a piece of cake!Overall I'm really happy with this purchase and would recommend it to anyone who loves drinking loose leaf tea. It's a real game changer for us and it's definitely a quality product at a decent price!