I'd imagine it's heat damage through the thin porcelain (if it is porcelain) walls. It could also be dishwasher-related I suppose.
I got my plastic ruler out of the drawer. It turns out that the thickness of the mug wall is just 3mm. A quick spin on Google reveals that the average wall thickness of a standard mug is around 6mm - double our experience.
It's no wonder our mugs lose so much heat! Not only is the surface area bigger, not only does it hold 28% more tea but the mug wall is half the normal thickness (in case you're wondering by the way, I measured to the inner wall last time).
This means that if the walls were as thick as those of a standard mug, the surface area would go down from 57cm2 to 52cm2 (9%) and the volume would go from 510cm3 to 475cm3 (7%).
So that could mean that the mugs could cool down almost 10% more slowly, right? I'm not sure how proportional it is.
Of course, the old mugs had a surface area of 44cm2 and a capacity of 397cm3 so it still wouldn't be quite back to the good old days.
So, another idea for an experiment occurs to me. I'm one visit to the stationery cupboard away from 'borrowing' a roll of bubblewrap.
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