North Americans of my acquaintance, I have a question about kettles. In particular electric ones. Do you…not have them? Is that like an exclusively European or even British thing? Cos I’ve read a few fics recently were someone’s making a cup of tea (in a flat, in London) and they ‘filled the kettle and put it on the burner’. And my brain is like O_o do they have an aga???? I’ve never seen someone put a kettle on a gas hob but I guess if you had an old school kettle you could? Most people would just fill the kettle, plug it in and once its boiled pour said hot water over a teabag in a cup? (Yeah, its nicer if you make it in a pot but most people who aren’t like really into their tea wouldn’t bother unless they have guests and are making lots of tea.) I just really confused? Are kettles in the states (and canada, I presume) not plastic things, with elements, that plug into the wall?

I’m Canadian and everyone I know owns an electric kettle. I guess I might write about a stove top one for ambiance? But honestly I don’t know anyone who owns those anymore.

I’m American and I’ve only seen an electric kettle once in my life, in the possession of a person who frequents specialized tea shops.

We do have metal old-school kettles you heat on the stove but honestly it’s an aesthetic thing mostly and used for decoration.

We have both but only people who drink tea frequently or are in it for aesthetic will own either. These people are in the vast minority.

The tea drinkers I know microwave it, when they drink hot tea at home.

Coffee makers, on the other hand, are ubiquitous, and keurigs are on the rise.

AMERICANS MICROWAVE THEIR WATER FOR TEA????? i dont know what i expected from people who think that a fun party is throwing their tea in a lake…for shame

We have an electric kettle. Used to have a stovetop kettle too but I remember playing with that in the basement as a little kid so I don’t think we used it all that much. My sis’s really into tea, so’s my mum, so they drink it a lot.

Bean’s even got a special infuser thingy. It’s glass and apparently makes it better.

I have a stove kettle. It’s a couple years old, and I use it almost daily. I’ve seen lots of electric kettles but honestly prefer metal to plastic.

I’d prefer an electric kettle myself - it heats up a lot quicker! But my family has sort of agreed that we’ll continue to use our metal stovetop one until it breaks, which will be never.

I only heat up water in the microwave in times of desperation, and then it’s usually for hot choc.

I didn’t get an electric water kettle til i moved away to college, and the only reason I got it is we weren’t allowed to have microwaves in our room and I wanted to be able to have ramen in the middle of the night without getting dressed…. At home my mom always microwaves water for tea and coffee.

I’m American but live in England, we always had a stovetop kettle when I was growing up and I have one here now. Electric are faster, yes, but our first home was a one bedroom cottage next to a graveyard that had a dinky kitchen. There was no counter space for a kettle so we bought a stovetop and never went back when we moved house. Most people I know here use electric.

I’m American and the only place I’ve seen one is at a workplace because so many of us drank tea throughout the day and the microwave was weak. 

When I make it at home I put a metal kettle right on the stove and heat it up, or microwave it, but I prefer the former. I don’t think I know anybody that owns one in their home. They look useful, though, might get one, mostly because I also like pourover coffee and waiting for it to boil in the morning is just two minutes TOO LONG some days. :D

I’m the only person I know that has an electric kettle. Aside from tea, I probably use it weekly just to get quick hot water. Before that, I had a stove-top. Just say no to microwaved hot water.

I’ve had electric kettles, but we don’t drink enough tea to warrant another appliance. We have a stovetop whistling kettle, or microwave it. Now, most Americans have COFFEE MAKERS! That’s what we drink. And not espresso drinks. Just plain old Juan Valdez coffee. Drip through the filter, lots of cream and sugar, and some hazelnut to top. Yum!

I’ve had an electric hot pot for years, first because of college dorm rooms and later because of convenience (and now again because I technically don’t have a proper stove in my apartment and the hot pot is the easiest way to boil water).  I admit though, if I’m feeling especially lazy and still want tea, I’ll run the water through my k-cup machine which usually heats it up to a decent temperature for tea.  No microwaving required.

My parents, however, they have one of those water coolers with a hot water spigot on there.  So guess how mom makes her evening tea?

I drink tea rather than coffee in the morning and prefer loose-leaf to teabags. I’ve had stovetop kettles and electric. I recently bought a new electric kettle, a Hamilton Beach; it isn’t so much that it’s faster as that I feel somehow less likely to pour boiling water all over the place, or set myself on fire by catching a sleeve in the flame of the stove.

I loathe Keurig machines on principle, even if I feel like having coffee. You can make perfectly good coffee by boiling the water and pouring it over the proper grind; my ex used to use a two-cup filter and cone, being the only coffee drinker in the house. I will confess to having microwaved water for tea, but only when I was feeling so depressed that making a proper pot seemed overwhelming. 

But….microwaving it completely alters the flavour. Eugh. Eugh. We have a filter-coffeepot for coffee but even when we had a gas stove growing up in the UK, we had an electric kettle.  Besides tea, how in hell do you fill hot water bottles without a kettle?

Americans haven’t used hot water bottles since WWII.

WTF? Most of you don’t use rubberised hot water bottles with a variety of coverings that you put hot water in to snuggle up to? What about periods or being sick? Do you just use heat packs?

“Heat packs” like those disposable things you might get from a drugstore? Yeah. Also, hot towels and electric blankets.

I’m an American with a hot water bottle and a whistling stovetop tea kettle.

I’m an American by have family that have lived in Canada where they had up the electric kettle. I have an electric kettle more for French press or aeropress coffee than tea. I also use it to heat up water for boiling because it is faster than the stove. Also, I don’t own a microwave and people seem to think that is weird.

im american. i have an electric kettle, and a breville teamaker. i use the microwave at work tho.

I’m American and the only time I’ve seen an electric kettle was when I was in Japan. I didn’t even know they existed before that.

I’m American and I’ve had hot water bottles since I was born (AND it comes in a cute bottle cozy shaped like a moose), and I and my parents have electric kettles. $15 on Amazon, ya’ll.

I had an electric kettle when I was in college the first time around, for hot water to make ramen with.

However, I HIGHLY DEBATE that heating your water via a kettle VS a microwave can in any way, shape or form alter the flavor. All a microwave does is send energy into the water to make the water molecules move faster, making the water hotter. It literally cannot import a “flavor” of any kind to the water, because microwave energy doesn’t have a flavor. It’s made up of light particles/waves. You can’t taste sunlight or lamp light or x-rays, either. Light energy doesn’t have flavor.

A clean kettle shouldn’t give flavor either for that matter; it just heats the water via induction (external source heats the kettle, and that hot material of the kettle touches the water, which makes the water molecules move fast, which makes them hot). 

So unless you’ve all got really bad kettles that leech metal into your water when you’re heating it… a microwave cannot “alter” the flavor of water.

Remember that a lot of Americans live in places where it doesn’t get cold enough to need hot water bottles…

Microwaves don’t affect the flavor of water. They DO affect the flavor of tea, though, if you just drop a teabag into cold water and microwave the whole arrangement. That cooks, rather than steeps, the leaves, and makes the whole thing taste hideous. If you’re going to boil water for tea in a microwave, boil it separately from the teabag and then add the teabag after (or infuser, if that’s your jam).

Anyway I’ve had an electric and a stovetop kettle as a Canadian and US dual citizen. Kettles just aren’t the biggest deal over here, and frankly, if you’d been using a stovetop one for ages there wasn’t much reason to replace it when electrics became widely available.

i grew up in the US- my parents were earlyish adopters of electric kettles; we got one when i was about 15 (in the mid-2000s). 

my grandparents got one last week, under duress (read: my mom bought it for them), and seem perplexed as to how to use it. 

it has one button.

I’m Canadian and all my life my family have used stove-top kettles. I know plenty of Canadians who use electric kettles though.

@abackwaterprincess have we had this discussion yet? I can’t remember. XD

I’m an American, but my family is Puerto Rican–coffee is a mandatory staple in our house. I didn’t really get into drinking tea until college, where I had a professor/mentor who owned an electric kettle and also a friend who would occasionally send me mixes.

While I still mostly lean towards drinking coffee, I’ve got a pretty ample tea collection. I don’t really like heating the water in a microwave, though (mostly because my drinking cups of choice aren’t microwave-safe), and our current coffeemaker is kind of big and bulky (because when it comes to the amount of coffee we drink in the morning we’re practically stereotypical, thus requiring a heavy-duty machine). Might not be a bad idea to consider asking for an electric kettle that I can keep in my room…

American and avid tea-drinker. Growing up we always had a metal kettle for the stove, but when my grandma learned how much tea I drank she got me an electric one for Christmas, which I admit I’ve never seen in anyone else’s house. Most people don’t drink enough tea to bother. At work I microwave the water first then add the tea but it’s a less enjoyable ritual. I really should get one for work, but our counter space is limited….

I never saw a hot water bottle until I stayed in England for a few weeks. The room I was in had what appeared to be a small pillow with horses on at the foot of the bed. I ignored it for 2 weeks until I accidentally touched it one day and felt the rubber inside the cloth. When I realized what it was it was like an epiphany and I immediately filled it with warm water and was AMAZED at how happy my frozen icicle feet became. What is UP with England and its penchant for being freezing indoors? Outside I understand of course, but I could never get warm inside while I was there! And I’m from Portland, Oregon, which is just as damp and cold as Cambridge in the winter, so I’ve really no idea how my feet were just perpetually cold there. I suspect poor insulation in the houses or old heating systems.

Canadian, Ontario. I have both an electric and a stovetop kettle! I would never *dream* of using microwaved water for tea. Or of putting the tea bag in after the water goes into the mug from the kettle. It tastes different - flatter, smoother. Not as alive.

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

I love this

Fun read.

stressed. — lemon balm tea. bloated. — peppermint tea. slow metabolism. — green tea. nauseous. — ginger tea. sleepless nights. — chamomile tea. common cold. — elderflower tea.

Mint tea: a Dubai delicacy.

See more wonderful Dubai culture here

LUPICIA || The Book of Tea 100

Reblog if you like tea.

Any kind. Hot. Cold. White. Green. Black. Rooibos. Herbal. Oolong. Sweet. Unsweet. With Milk. Without. Tea is great.

some common varieties of tea dragon!

This Tea Rituals Around the World slideshow at Condé Nast Traveler (condenasttraveler) is a tea-lover’s delight! Never before have I seen tea time look so sumptuous. Click through to learn about the tea traditions behind these beautiful and mouthwatering arrangements. Just looking at them has inspired me to make a cuppa!

How to drink hot tea

1. Make cup of tea 2. Sip tea 3. Tea is too hot 4. Let tea cool 5. Forget you have a cup of tea

The first sip of tea is always the hardest.

that isn’t supposed to be inspirational, I’m just stating it’s fucking nerve-racking waiting for it to touch your lips and potentially having it melt your face off 

Goldfish Tea Bag - Charm Villa via Mister Finch.

Lustik:  twitter | pinterest | etsy

I must find these. I must have these.

//EEEEEEEEEEEE

IT’S ALWAYS TEA TIME!

How Long to Steep Tea