Any really good automatic tea makers?

I was looking for a teamaker myself and I researched the adagio one, too. There are two more issues with it:

1. iirc the upper compartment is plastic
2. electrically heated water does not make for good white or green teas in my experience (but this may have to do with slow electrical heating, because the two electrical heating methods I tried were both much slower than some electrical kettles).

Generally speaking I don't think there will be a good tea maker in foreseeable future for a reasonable price. Tea is just much more variable and sensitive (for some teas) to make than coffee. You need two containers, and you need to quickly filter the tea to

2nd container when time's up.

Relatively few people drink higher grade teas and they will often prefer their fancy clay or glass pots.

If you're making white tea after pu-erh or black, you'll need to wash out both containers carefully. With an auto teamaker this may be harder than with a standard pot.

Measuring out right quantity of tea is an important and tricky part of tea making. Ideally if you have an expensive tea maker you might as well ask for the one that measures weight of leaf and tells you if it's less or more than is needed for current preset and amount of tea.

What I'm wondering is whether someone who's an enterprising wallace-like (of wallace and grommit) type ever made a custom auto tea maker. That would be cool. As for commercial viable offering for all types of teas, I doubt we'll see one in the next 10-15 years at the least.

I just want to add that a perfect tea maker would also compress spent leaves, put them in a disposal container and then flush and scrub the brewing vessel. All in all, it'd be like one of those $1k+ espresso machines, only bulkier. Except that tea is better than espresso.

Someone on Amazon mentioned that. Not sure if that is a problem. Depends on the type of plastic, I would think.

Electon contamination? Do stovetop teapots qualify as being electrically heated if used on an electric range?

Really? Seems like I've read many opinions here that a few seconds one way or the other won't matter much. In the Adagio video, the finished tea appears to drain into the pot in a few seconds.

That's probably true, but these units must be selling to someone. If they can sell a mediocre unit for $100, they ought to be able to sell an excellent one for $125. None of the deficiencies seems all that expensive to fix.

You mean the infuser and the pot? Others have commented on this as well. But even if you use a regular teapot, you have this problem.

Now you have a feature that will add considerably to the price for minimal gain. I don't need to weigh the teas I use regularly, and for the new ones, my scale works fine.

I hope you are wrong. In the meantime, I may have to try one of the ones currently available.

While intrepidly exploring the bowels of USENET on Thursday, August

14, 2008, Square Peg (00) rolled initiative and posted the following:

I haven't found one that thrilled me enough to buy it.

I've been pretty happy with the utiliTEA kettle from Adagio, although it's capacity is slightly lacking. But it works well with the ingenuiTEA, also from Adagio.

This has been the closest to automated I've gotten, although I have been thinking about the triniTEA for the office.

But the fact that I've yet to feel compelled enough to buy it probably says something.

What is the temperature range and how many settings are there? I can't tell from the web photo.

You clearly haven't been subjected to enough advertising to bump up your *need*.

I've been drinking a lot of gongfu tea lately, and I hate the tepid water by the last pot. So I just caved on this guy:

after seeing it advertised on teamail.

The specified 1000W seems a little low for a kettle, but maybe it makes it easier to hold a temperature, or maybe it's a rebadged/lightly tweaked 230V model whose boiler is underpowered for

115V. Either way, it seems like it won't be too big a deal if I'm heating water to sub-boiling temperatures.

My order is scheduled to arrive Monday, so I can post first impressions then.

N.

How does a tea kettle solve the tepid water problem? Do you plan to put the brewed tea back in the kettle to keep warm?

Because a kettle heats water?

Eew. This is for the water for multiple infusions. I heat the water once and adjust to the desired temperature. By the last infusion, it has cooled a lot in the kettle, and I have to reheat it. So, instead, what I'd like to do is keep the water temperature stable (or increase it gradually).

N.

OK, I get it.

Does this unit keep the water at a specified temperature?

The website says, "Controller falls back to warm setting automatically, to keep water warm after boiling."

I can't read the controls from the web picture. I guess you don't know the answer since you won't get it until Monday. When you do, please post a report on how well it keeps water at a given temperature and what that range is.

That's after boiling. I believe it says it can also heat to a specified temperature and hold (+/- "3%"), like the Home Tek kettle that was discussed here before. But yeah, I'll be able to say more once I've seen how/whether it actually works.

N.

I saw a news report about the trinitea a year or so ago and was excited to get one. However, I found many complaints online that it leaks. Perhaps they've solved that problem?

Alan

OK, this is in fact pretty great. It's 1.5L, it is actually 1000W, but it has an updating display of the current temperature, so it's not as bad as if it just magically took longer. ;)

It basically works exactly like it ought to:

• If you set the temp before pressing the on button, it heats to the setpoint and holds.

• If you set the temp after pressing the on button, it heats to a boil and holds the temperature once it falls to the setpoint.

• It (the brains are in the base) remembers the current operating mode for 2 minutes while the kettle is removed, after which it shuts off.

• You can adjust the setpoint at any time.

• The temperature display is Fahrenheit. I suspect this can be switched to Celsius.

No complaints yet. This looks like it'll become my primary kettle for tea and coffee, so some may surface.

N.

The reviews on Amazon were not encouraging.

While intrepidly exploring the bowels of USENET on Monday, August 18,

2008, Natarajan Krishnaswami rolled initiative and posted the following:

Thank you for the review. My savings target for a new kettle may just have gone up.

We're still talking about the Digital Kettle Pro, right?

I don't want to set my sights on the wrong kettle.

Alan

I receive the Adagio TriniTea as a wedding gift. I used it in the office, so I can have tea all day long. For the most part, I enjoy it. No, it's not quite the same as making tea in a kettle and then a pot, but the teas and tisanes I've made (oolongs and rooibois) have turned out fairly well, and I can't really make tea in a kettle while at the office. So it serves a good purpose for me. My only real complaint is that the infuser, like the rest of it, is made of plastic, and the holes are kind of big, so rooibos leaves escape easily. It just can't replace a mesh infuser. But like I said, it's fantastic to have at work!

Before the TriniTea I used a tea maker made by Sunbeam. It was okay, but not great. You couldn't adjust water temperature or brewing time. Also, it was difficult to clean, and had to be done with vinegar. (Another great thing about the TriniTea is that it's easy to keep clean). And it honestly didn't work all that well, and broke irreparably in less than a year.

While intrepidly exploring the bowels of USENET on Wednesday, August

20, 2008, Allyson rolled initiative and posted the following:

Oh, sure. Make my decision more complicated. (heh)

Do you have problems with the triniTEA leaking, or do you think user error is more likely to cause the problem?

I ask because I read a lot of reviews about an entirely different product that leaked, but it seemed that most of the problems related to inattentive users who just weren't getting things back in the right places.