We’re apparently hard on electric kettles. Certainly we use them a lot as we make a lot of tea in our house. As a result we’ve gone through several electric kettles recently. When we bought the last one we looked at several kettles with thermostats so you could get 180F for green tea and 212F for black, but none of the few we found looked like they’d do the trick, so we ended up with a nice “traditional” (boil and stop) kettle.
Today when I should have been doing something more productive with my time I discovered that what we may have wanted (but didn’t know it) was a spiffy Japanese kettle (a denki poto). Looks like these things keep your water up to temperature all day long so you get essentially instant hot water at the temperature you desire. Sounds pretty keen.
And just to bore the tar out of everyone, I can even trace the exact route that brought me to this point:
- Pharyngula lists But she’s a girl… on his blogroll.
- BSAG is blogging about a recent trip to Japan, and commented on their nifty high-tech toilets, with a pointer to a more detailed piece by imomus.
- While extolling the virtues of Japanese toilets, imomus also waxed eloquent about Japanese kettles, but was grumpy that he couldn’t get one built for German electrics.
- An anonymous commenter went digging and found a U.S. web site for Zojirushi, one of the major Japanese manufacturers of such devices.
- Zojirushi then have a page devoted to electric kettles fitted for U.S. electrics.
- From that page there are links to U.S. retailers that sell such nifty devices, including SunPowerUSA and AsiaChi.
Ain’t the Internet swell?
No idea if we’ll actually buy one of these, but they do look cool and it would be neat to look into it a little more.
And now you have educated at least one more person on the potential for a better tea kettle. I had no idea of the possibilities. The tea kettle ( I use a stovetop unit from KMart with a harsh whistle) is my favorite kitchen gadget mostly because I drink lots of tea. While I regularly try any flavor or brand of tea I come across (not many out here in the dry West), it never occured to me that I should be shopping for the latest and greatest in kettles.
Thanks
WeatherGirl is Britiish, so tea is very serious busines in our house. We used to drive the 1.5 hours to St. Cloud to buy tea, as that was the closest place where we could find a reasonable selection of Twinings (her preferred brand at the time). Luckily she’s since found reasonable sources of Twining’s on-line (not sure what they are, though – sorry). Even cooler (in my opinion) is our discovery (thanks to Wendel and Anna!) of Adagio. They have a wonderful and broad selection of excellent teas, and get way too much of our money. I’ve even inadvertently gotten a few of our students hooked on Adagio teas and we have quite the little tea group going down in the CSci lab.
In the end, though, there’s nothing wrong with the old school stove kettle. An electric kettle tends to be a little faster to come to boil and not heat the room up so much in the summer. More importantly, though, our stove top is frequently buried in dishes, especially right after we finish dinner and really need a cuppa.
Excellent. Thanks for the Adagio link.
Thanks this comment’s author. i like also than tea very much. Black tea, gren tea and ETC. But i like more much than turkish
tea from turkish glass. really very nice it is. You cant trying it