this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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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
They do things right out in Cornwall. We were vacationing at lands end when storm Henk made landfall, it was memorable to say the least.
we asian muricans use those kettles for instant ramen lol
Tea, instant ramen, oatmeal, eggs, electric kettles are awesome and really convenient.
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…
Hmmm. Most of the Americans I 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.
Was... Was that an euphemism?
Is that weird? I would assume snakes wouldn’t want to eat a frozen mouse.
It was not.
Not the poster you're responding to by my spouse has snakes and uses our kettle to boil water to thaw out their mice
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.
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.
...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.
Edit: found some stats on American home coffee brewing. Among Americans who brew coffee at home, 48% tend to use a drip machine, and 29% use a pod machine, neither of which requires a kettle. If we assume the entire pour over (5%) and French press (5%) market owns a kettle, and that the entire "other" category (6%) owns a kettle (which seems very generous), that's still only 16% of home coffee drinkers using a kettle. (Another 7% use an espresso machine or percolator, and I think the last 1% was lost to rounding.)
Drip machines make worse coffee and are more of a hassle than just dumping hot water into the filter holder all at once so I'll chalk it up to abysmal US coffee culture combined with consumerism, then.
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.
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).
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.
If kettles were continuous loads we'd have to reduce from 16A to 10A (2200W) or 8A (1800W). Schuko are rated for as little as 1h of 16A but for a kettle that's plenty, they're done in a minute or two.
German stoves are connected to at least 2x10A, newer installations (as in since the 70s or such) all provide 3x16A. Not actually three-phase they're still 220V appliances. Whether the outlets, light etc. are on different phases differs widely.
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.
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.
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.
You get 3-phase in the US if you live in a large apartment complex. Especially if it has an elevator. Since this combines to get 208V, the math works out to making your 240V stove only 75% of what it should be.
For residential use, split phase is fine. We just run the two legs to get 240V on the specific things that need it. That's generally electric stoves, water heaters, AC unit, electric dryer, and more recently, EV chargers. 3-phase is great when you're driving something that spins with a high draw, and of those, only the AC unit does that (electric dryers spend most of their electricity heating, not spinning).
Edison distributed +-110V DC against neutral, three wires, your AC system was designed to use those exact wires, then you expanded that compromise to the whole continent.
Europe in the beginning also had those small insular installations with odd systems but once it came to actually hooking up whole countries everyone opted for three-phase because it's the most sensible option. Whether or not the distribution network itself uses three conductors (just the phases) or four (plus neutral, or combined earth+neutral) differs quite wildly. Train electricity is still a clusterfuck.
I’ve actually timed my kettle. 15 ounces of water(I have larger mugs than ‘normal’) takes 2 minutes and 34 seconds to be a full rolling boil. I’m really not that concerned.
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 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 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
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