Europeans when they discover that no, most Americans really do not own a kettle rule.
let alone an electric kettle
I don’t know what happened. We used to be really into tea. Blame the Townshend Acts I guess?
Cultural taste can change over time for various reasons. Tea has been inherently traditional to many countries, not as much to others.
We dumped that tea into the Boston Harbor because we didn’t want that crap.
No we did, it was good tea. That’s what made the message clear, the value being sacrificed. The popular American predilection for tea up until after the Townshend Acts was well documented by de Tocqueville. It was only after that drinking tea was considered “unpatriotic”. Before then we would even eat boiled tea leaves with butter as a side dish. We were mad about the stuff, but as a colony we were only allowed to buy British tea. It was a whole thing.
Anyway I’ve had an electric kettle for ages. It’s more common in Asian-American households perhaps. We didn’t fit in that well in the states, so we went back to the UK. Now I only buy British tea again. Full circle.
we asian muricans use those kettles for instant ramen lol
I can’t imagine life without an electric kettle…
we are shifting to boiling taps too now
Wait, do Americans not own kettles?
That’s like one of the first things I bought when I moved out.
their shitty electrical grid means kettles take like double the time to boil.
Great video on this from technology connections. tl;dr it takes more time, but not, like, that much more. We mostly just don’t have a huge tea-drinking culture here.
My family (American) did drink a lot of tea. Surprise surprise, we had a kettle. I did not die of old age from the cumulative weight of all that waiting.
I did not die of old age from the cumulative weight of all that waiting.
Not yet. Just you wait.
chronic exposure to time dramatically increases your chances of getting terminally old.
So why does Japan at 100V have electric kettles everywhere? It’s a cultural reason not the electrical grid.
good point! i don’t know much about their grid, only that it’s 50Hz in the west and 60Hz in the east.
I’ve never heard of anywhere in US using 50Hz and I’ve lived on the West Coast my whole life.
that may be because we were talking about japan!
Not that East and West, the East and West.
Pretty much every person I know in Canada has an electric kettle and every single office I’ve worked in has one, my kitchen has 15a outlets which is still 1800W. I have a simple gooseneck kettle that I usw mainly for coffee, it’s only 1kW and holds around 750ml, it’s not blisteringly fast but it’s boiled before I’ve ground my coffee.
The whole “120v is holding us back from having kettles” is way overblown (technology connections has a video on electric kettles).
Our grid uses the same voltages as Europe. Our houses even generally receive 240V from the line. It’s just that we went with 120V for most appliances and electronics for some reason.
I’d also argue a lot of Americans technically do have electric kettles, and they just don’t realize it because they’re advertised as coffee makers. It’s not ideal, but you can definitely use a drip coffee machine to boil water, and it’ll still be faster than a stove.
Unfortunately for every tea drinker in an American hotel, most coffee makers (at least the drip kind) will make any water boiled inside taste like coffee, unless they’ve been used exclusively for plain boiled water. Maybe a combo tea/coffee drinker wouldn’t mind, but I’ve always found it intolerable.
But it’s a good point about the grid - we have plenty of appliances for coffee that are principally glorified water boilers, and there’s no evidence that our appliance voltage has hampered their popularity at all.
it really doesn’t. european houses generally receive 400V from the line, split into 3 220V phases. you guys get two 120V phases that are fully phase-shifted, rather than 120° offset, and you bridge two phases to get 240 for heavy appliances.
It’s mostly for commercial installations, but you can get 3-phase 480V here if you want it.
I don’t think this has much to do with the grid, though. It’s more that we started with 120V appliances, so that’s what we built our homes to support.
not true, that’s a myth
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Tea isn’t that popular here although I’d argue in recent years it has been gaining on what it once was. I think where other countries kettles are the norm, here “coffee makers” are the norm.
The majority of the more “popular” form of tea we’d have here is probably considered an abomination onto nuggin elsewhere: sweet tea. (Iced tea with about 628648lbs of sugar in it.)
I think this is the largest reason right here. People are naturally going to reserve their limited counter space for the stuff they use daily. For Americans, that’s more likely to be some kind of coffee maker than an electric kettle.
Growing up where I did, I knew a lot of families that regularly made iced tea. But they usually made a gallon at a time, once or twice a week, and still drank coffee every day - so they had counter top coffee makers, and stovetop kettles that could be stored away the rest of the week.
I had a dedicated saucepan to make iced tea to ensure my tea only tasted like tea.
I guess I’m surprised, I’m in Canada so expected we’d be very similar.
But you also have garbage disposals and I’ve never seen one here.
I own one because I’m a coffee snob and enjoy pourovers. Before I went down that whole road, no. And neither did anyone I knew well enough to dig through their kitchen
In my country (and most of northern Europe I presume), induction stoves are becoming very common. I tossed my electric kettle 7 years ago when I got induction.
It’s faster than a kettle in most of my pots.
Are we talking about electric kettles or kettles in general?
So, I’m Greek and I also have never used a kettle. In fact, you won’t find one in most households. But all of us have a briki. It’s like a mini pot!
We use it to boil water/make cofee/tea/boil 1-2 eggs etc
An electric kettle is a counter appliance and therefore degeneracy. A stovetop kettle is functional decoration though.
a stovetop kettle is literally bigger takes up a hob takes more time to boil and costs more money
I don’t need the burner space most of the time, compared to the counter space. Plus, like I said, it looks better, so the aesthetics justify the cost. I agree the boil time is a problem, but it’s a small price to pay for clear counters. It’s starts with a kettle. Then you have a toaster, and an air fryer and a coffee grinder and a coffee machine and before you know it your house is 37% counter appliances by mass. The only option is to be an extremist.
This one extended a little with a great literate addition 😂
wow, actual iambic pentameter, impressive.
the scenography is ass though.🤣🤣🤣 holy shit my sides
Long live King Pidoop.
That was something.
lol no shit many Americans don’t own a kettle, they apparently rank 36th in tea consumption per capita. Breaking news lads, they aren’t as enamored with it as the next higher usage countries.
List of countries by tea consumption per capita
The UK is 3rd, behind Ireland and Turkey. Get your shit together, UK.
I usually use my kettle to make coffee (handfiltered/pour-over).
Facts.
BUT as an American southerner, our iced tea consumption is through the roof and it fuels our economies, sweet tea and fried chicken
Growing up, we’d make sun tea, and I feel like that’d send a lot of tea drinkers running. In the morning, you’d take a gallon jar of water, a dozen teabags, bunch of sugar, and let it sit in the sun during the day, and drink it that evening.
Fun fact, due to the power difference in the US, kettles are much slower here than some other places. You can run a 3kW kettle on the grid in the UK, and boil a single cup’s worth of tea water in about 45 seconds. In the US, most outlets won’t allow more than 1800W, or 1.8kW, so the best kettles will take almost twice as long.
That’s almost a minute and thirty one seconds! Daft.
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What is this lunacy… at least boil it in a pot 😭
what size microwave do you have that can fit a full pot?
💀
Cattle
Use one of those mixing bowls that has a spout.
Heating up a mug of water in the microwave is fine. I don’t get why people are so snobby about this. The water doesn’t care where the heat energy comes from.
It definitely tastes different - flatter somehow. I don’t know why, but it does.
Tea will taste different depending on what temperature water it’s brewed in, but I can’t think of any reason the water itself would be different.
e: The material of the vessel would matter. Perhaps you like the taste imbued by your kettle, which would be lacking if you heated the water directly in a mug.
Do you put a spoon in it though?
do british people not have arizona iced tea?
Now we need to get the South Asians and East Asians fighting about putting milk in tea.
Honestly if you want to boil water quickly just use a pan. Takes like 30 seconds.
That sentence you constructed. I have some opinions about it.
My kettle doesn’t even boil in 30s…
Are you boiling 50ml?
Trolling the British level: expert
nah, it’s just practical.
every time i make tea, i have to wait because it’s too hot. and then i forget about it, so it’s tepid when i remember. but by then i’m committed so i’m used to just drinking tepid tea now.
plus, it keeps my sour milk from curdling
I have a kettle with a temperature setting that solved this problem for me. It can also maintain the temperature electronically, but I’ve usually give through a liter before it has a chance to cool much.
your kettle kinda sounds like we need another tea party
Something something typical US circuits can deliver less power than typical Euro circuits. Not a lot less though.
I used to own a $15 plastic electric kettle, but it died after a year or two. When I went to target to get a new (hopefully better) one, I realized I could instead buy a plug-in induction plate on sale for $50, and a plain stainless steel kettle that somehow cost only $1.50 (less than the shitty bread that I was also buying? how?). The induction plate was honestly one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. Sure, I have to wear earplugs to tolerate the high-pitched scream that the frequency driver makes, but it boils water just as well as an electric kettle and is also soooo much nicer to cook on than the resistive curlicue burners that came with my apartment.
Technology Connections did a video on this rule.
regular US outlets are 120V. regular EU outlets are 240V. P=VI, so to produce the same amount of power as a 240V kettle, a 120V kettle needs to draw twice as much current.
the gauge of a wire determines how much current it can carry without setting insulation on fire. home outlets are typically wired for 15A, around the world. so in EU, 15A service can deliver twice as much power since that’s 15A of current at 240V = 3.6kW, while in the US at 120V = 1.8kW.
so EU kettles are twice as powerful, typically.
At least here in Australia, 15A circuits are not very common. Only one of the places I’ve ever lived had a 15A outlet in a shed, which was likely installed by the previous owner for running a welder or plasma cutter, or some other high peak power tool like that. 3.6kW is massive overkill for general household use.
The standard circuit here is 10A, which gives you 2.4kW to play with. It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly that was part of the point Technology Connections was making - that the difference isn’t actually that great between 120 and 240V countries in practice. The change to boiling time from an electric kettle was pretty inconsequential between the two.
I believe he postulated that the real reason Americans don’t have electric kettles was that they didn’t have much need for them. They mostly don’t drink tea, and their coffee is largely prepared using drip coffee makers that heat their own water.
I didn’t bring my 3Kw UK kettle over because I heard it would probably blow the circuit. But my Australian colleague who moved back over here brought his UK toaster and it actually did blow the circuit.
Hmm for some reason the numbers 1600 and 2000 W were rattling around my head for US and Europe respectively. I know most US appliances don’t like to pull the full 15 A because that’s when the breaker trips, but that would scale roughly the same for Europe so the power ratio should still be as you describe. I guess I either was misremembering or got the EU number from an abnormally low-current circuit.
I forgot TC did a video on this. I’ll have to watch when I have the time.
this is one of my favourite dumb conversations
You know if you have a metal mug and an induction stove, you could put it right on the burner. Just don’t use the handle after.
Btw if you steep tea too long it turns bitter, so that’s what happens if you steep it cold. It is possible though.
I only microwave my water for 2 minutes.
I once had a four-year long argument with an Argentinian man who insisted you could “burn” water.
I kept on driving him to the point that not heating water to the boiling point will provide less bitter tea, yes, but you cannot burn water.
It was like pouring water on a duck’s back. Hence 4 years of sustained bickering.
Edit for clarification, he would pour out water if it ever reached the boiling point because in his mind it was now permanently spoiled, burnt
1 coffee mug/tea cup of water in the microwave for 1 minute is perfect for a single serving bag of tea. it doesn’t have to be boiling, just hot. 1 min is also not long enough to dangerously superheat water. hot is water is hot water, it doesn’t matter if you do it kettle or microwave.
doesn’t have to be boiling
Depends on the tea.
Black generally should. Green absolutely shouldn’t.
