We’ve been using an electric kettle to boil our water when we want to drink coffee or tea. One of those that doesn’t even shut-off automatically, you have to pull the plug when you think the water is ready. So we started looking for a new kettle that would look nicer in the kitchen and would not burn the house down if we forgot to unplug it.

We looked in a few places: The Bay, Sears, various kitchen gadget stores. They all had the same stuff and the nice looking kettles where $90 minimum, so we gave up. That is until we wandered into a tea shop and saw the utiliTEA, a nice looking stainless steel kettle with temperature control.

The knob on the bottom allows you to control the water temperature when the kettle shutfs off. If you want to boild the water you crank it all the way to the right. On my kettle the middle setting heats the water to about 82C and the middle of the shaded area gives you about 92C. After some trial and error you can find out where the right setting is for whatever you are brewing: coffee, green tea, black tea.

The units are not calibrated so you have to use the kettle a few times to figure out where the temperatures are on your kettle, but it doesn’t take very long and the results are worth it. Compared to the other stainless steel kettles we saw the utiliTEA was about $20 cheaper at $70. And the other kettles didn’t have the temperature control.

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