Using cold water is the quickest, most energy-efficient and convenient way to make tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate.
How are you making hot chocolate with cold water? Lithium mixed in with the chocolate?
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.
This one extended a little with a great literate addition 😂
Long live King Pidoop.
wow, actual iambic pentameter, impressive.
the scenography is ass though.🤣🤣🤣 holy shit my sides
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?
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.
ngl there’s a tea from Cornwall that is my absolute favorite black tea now
we asian muricans use those kettles for instant ramen lol
Cultural taste can change over time for various reasons. Tea has been inherently traditional to many countries, not as much to others.
I can’t imagine life without an electric kettle…
we are shifting to boiling taps too now
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
I don’t get it either, I’ve always made tea with a small pot. It is just something to heat up water. It has a lid. The only time I started seeing a lot of kettles around was when pour over / V60 / Chemex became fashionable and every place started selling gooseneck kettles.
Hmmm. Most of the AmericansI know have electric kettles now. It’s probably my most used kitchen gadget. Great for making tea or coffee, or boiling water for oatmeal. I just used it tonight to get some warm water to soak my lizard (not a euphemism) and to thaw out a frozen mouse for a snake. Honestly it gets used probably 5 or 6 times a day most days.
to thaw out a frozen mouse for a snake
Was… Was that an euphemism?
Is that weird? I would assume snakes wouldn’t want to eat a frozen mouse.
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.
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.
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.
I love that you’ve come into a discussion about Japan’s electrical grid and still assumed that the conversation is about America.
I mean, the conversation started about America’s electric grid. It was ambiguous from context.
Pretty much every person I know in Canada has an electric kettle and they’re in 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).
my kitchen has 15a outlets which is still 1800W
1800W are not out of the ordinary for water cookers in Europe but that’s definitely on the weak side. 3000 to 3200 is usually the maximum, probably because pulling the full 3600W would drastically increase the chances of tripping a fuse. My food processor is 600W and I might want to make a coffee while kneading dough.
Have to drop the US number by 20% for continuous loads like a kettle would be.
That said, US homes built in the last 40 years or so tend to have a lot of separate circuits in the kitchen. My house has one for the fridge, one for the disposal, one for the dishwasher, one for the lights that’s shared with lights in adjacent areas, stove has its own 240V outlet, and then one for all the other plugs. If I ran the microwave and a kettle and a mixer all at once, I’d probably still trip it, but that’s a lot of multitasking going on.
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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.
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.
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.
As a combo tea/coffee drink, it tastes horrible. Nobody wants tea flavored coffee or coffee flavored tea. Although you usually don’t get tea flavored coffee in those hotel drip makers, but only because the grounds they use are shit tier quality and taste too burnt to even get tea flavors.
not true, that’s a myth
That’s not true and also it’s not the reason. We just don’t drink a lot of tea. There’s not a huge reason to own an electric kettle unless you’re drinking a lot of tea. It’s still much faster than a stovetop kettle.
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.
…you don’t brew your coffee hot?
Not sure what you mean. Americans do brew hot coffee, but they generally don’t use a kettle to brew it. Hand-brewing methods like pour over are a very recent trend here. In my experience growing up, the vast majority of households used an electric drip coffee machine, or a stovetop percolator before they had electricity. Even now, when pour over and the aeropress are starting to get popular, I’d wager that a vast majority of households are still using a machine - either a drip machine or one of those pod machines - rather than a brewing method that requires a kettle.
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.
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 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 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.
microwaving water is plain wrong
Seriously, I do it every morning. You don’t have to go in the other room and get distracted when waiting for the whistle and it tastes better imo. We have a stainless kettle, not sure why it tastes different. Especially if I try and speed the process. I kind of feel like it doesn’t matter.
“waiting for the whistle?” mate are you living in the 1800s or amish or something just buy a proper electric kettle
As an American, what is a proper electric kettle? Fr.
I just mean an electric kettle and not a stovetop one they’re faster smaller don’t take a hob and they’re literally cheaper there is literally no reason whatsoever to use a non electric kettle
I looked them up and have never seen one or seen anyone use them that I’ve noticed. Maybe at events? Is it faster than 2 minutes? Because that’s how long it takes for me to get the exact temp I need in the microwave.
if you put in just one mug of water yeah like 30 seconds but it can also boil the entire kettle full in like 3 minutes so you don’t have to wait 15 minutes every time you want boiling water to cook with
Ahhh, that makes more sense. I wasn’t picking up why you thought it was better. It’s not the cup of tea in the morning, it’s the boiling of a pot of water. Thanks for explaining it…
I’m surprised superheated water injuries aren’t more common with all these people microwaving single cups at a time.
What difference does it make?
energy efficiency, and most importantly, vibes
But isn’t it more efficient in the microwave, since you’re only heating the water, not the vessel?
Magnetrons are a lot less efficient than magnetic induction (which most modern electric kettles use). Magnetic induction is about 90% efficient at converting electricity to heat in the vessel, whereas the most efficient microwaves are about 60% efficient at converting electricity to microwaves.
So, if you don’t have an induction stove, nor a kettle…?
Yeah. Microwaves are more efficient than most non-induction stoves.
Actually, it has a lot of vibes. About 2 billion of them.
Theoretically it should be the most energy efficient method. You’re transferring all the energy directly into the water molecules, not heating up a container and hoping that heat transfers to the water.
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
this is one of my favourite dumb conversations
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.
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.
I loved sun tea growing up, sit your jug out there early when the day is really warming up and by the afternoon you could have a nice icy glass of sweet tea.
Supposedly it’s a bit dangerous because the water doesn’t get hot enough to kill any bacteria that would be on the bags or something. “Refrigerator Tea” is apparently a thing now but I haven’t given it a shot, maybe I will soon, Cold brew coffee is ok, maybe coldbrew tea is great also.
I usually use my kettle to make coffee (handfiltered/pour-over).
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.
do british people not have arizona iced tea?
Of course the tea tastes different hot: cold tea is better! 😜 🧋
But does cold brew tea?
But tea made without heating the water can have botulism or other bad bacteria.
It also will literally taste different, the same way cold brew coffee tastes different
Do you boil everything you eat or drink? Botulism is hardly a realistic risk for tea.
Honestly if you want to boil water quickly just use a pan. Takes like 30 seconds.
My kettle doesn’t even boil in 30s…
They might have an induction stove. The community housing project that owns the apartment I rent recently joined this pilot program to switch appliances from gas to electric to see how much it helped air quality and energy use in the home. It used to take me like 3 minutes to boil 2 cups of water on the stove, now that they replaced it with an induction stove it’s like 30 seconds. It’s amazing.
Are you boiling 50ml?
That sentence you constructed. I have some opinions about it.
I just write “IRANIAN NUCLEAR SCIENTIST HERE” on the cup, publish the pictures and location everywhere, don’t move it for years, and then Israel will heat it up instantly for free.
Now we need to get the South Asians and East Asians fighting about putting milk in tea.
I went to a Thai restaurant and they said, “Milk?” And I made a disgust face. A good Thai dude at another table said, “It’s not western milk.” And I tried it.
Wow.
Then he said, “Try it on toast.” And fuck me. Another wow!
This. It’s so sweet and good.
Ooo condensed milk is also great with coffee and is how you make Vietnamese coffee!
Alternatively, if you prefer tea, Hong Kong milk tea uses black tea and condensed milk too.
Oh god Vietnamese coffee is so fucking good, it’s like crack I swear.
Thai iced tea is absolutely incredible and makes use of it as well, highly recommend.
edit: I actually just had Hong Kong milk tea just last week, it was great!
I’m British the entire conversation is deeply offensive to my people. Microwaving??? Putting mugs on a stove??? I am appalled!
On that note, as someone from a commonwealth nation, I was deeply appalled during the height of the pandemic when kettles couldn’t be purchased here as they weren’t considered ‘essential items’.
One reason that some Americans microwave water rather than use a kettle is that our electricity is half the power of UK electricity. It takes a lot longer for an electric kettle to boil here. That said, I do use a kettle when boiling water for tea.
When I went, if I ever saw one it was the equivalent of those cheap travel kettles. I think the average person there just doesn’t use it enough to justify getting a good one.
We have a Zojirushi. 120V does limit it somewhat, but it’s fine.
The water in our area of country is also hard as shit. We have undersink RO now, but before then, mineral buildup in the kettle was bad. Crusted like concrete if we didn’t stay on top of it.
…softeners are essential in aquifer country; our zojirushi served us well for a decade but after our whole-house filter blew out a couple of years ago i’m starting to see iron deposits despite the softener…
US water softeners are usually only on the hot pipe. They tend to add sodium to the water, and it’s not recommended to make it your primary drinking water source.
What a bullshit excuse. I’m in Canada with exactly the same 110v power, and it takes very little time to kettle water. People say this all the time as some sort of justification, but it just isn’t.
I don’t even understand how that could work, surely a standard mug would break one way or another if you just stick it on the stove?
Porcelain has very good temperature shock resistance, stoneware quite good, earthenware bad. Your standard mug should be stoneware and take it just fine. There’s even stoneware pots.
The issue is rather that you shouldn’t use standard electric stoves with too small pots, on gas I guess that’s half-sensible but you’d be left with a charred mug that’s way too hot.
OK so the mug acts like a small pot, but isn’t the handle also crazy hot then?
Just thinking about it makes me want to go and lovingly stroke my kettle
Our electricity is 120v here in the US, so kettles take forever
Do microwaves have some magic efficiency trick that lets them produce heat faster from the same exact energy? Like, how do they manage to be more than 100% efficient?
Microwaves are designed to heat water molecules. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven
They don’t, kettles just aren’t that much more efficient at 120v. Like a kettle will still be faster, just not by enough for people to care.
US outlet is 120V@20A = 2.4kW UK outlet is 230V@13A = 3.0kW
It’s a 15% difference based on possible power draw.
Anecdotally the stove will still take many times longer. Even compared to induction my kettle is faster.
My guess is that in the UK/EU it’s not common to have powerful microwaves?
Most residential outlets in the US are going to be a 15A limit. You also have to reduce that by 20% for a continuous draw.
UK might be able to get away with the full usage because their plugs are designed to have a fuse built in. Not entirely sure on that, though.
That said, kettles are still a better option most of the time. Technology Connections has real world tests of this.
kettles take forever
For extremely small values of ‘forever’
