How we pick

The short version

We read what the manufacturers publish, record the URL every figure came from, work out what those figures mean for someone making tea, and rank on that. Where a maker publishes nothing, we say so. We do not test the gear and we never claim to.

Step 1 — Start from the decision, not the catalog

Every roundup begins with the question a beginner is actually asking. For kettles that question turned out to be a single one: do you drink green tea? Nearly everything else about the category follows from the answer, so the page is organized around it rather than around a feature matrix.

This is why our roundups are short. A page with seven picks where six are “also excellent” has decided nothing, and deciding is the job.

Step 2 — Read the maker’s own page

Specifications come from the manufacturer’s own product page wherever we can retrieve one, and the link sits directly beneath the figure on the product card. Not a marketplace listing, not a retailer’s summary, not another review site.

Where a manufacturer page could not be retrieved, we cite the specific retailer listing we did read and label it as such. You can always see which kind of source a number came from, because the label names the publisher.

Step 3 — Mark what could not be verified

Across the current registry there are 60 specifications with a named source and 22 marked Not verified. That second number is published on purpose.

A great deal of tea gear ships with no specification sheet at all. The industry norm is to paper over that with a figure lifted from a listing, and the result is a number that has been copied so many times nobody can say where it started. We would rather show the gap.

Step 4 — Rank on what changes the cup

The ordering is our judgment, and here is the judgment stated plainly so you can disagree with it: we rank by how much a specification changes what is in the cup, and we treat price as a constraint rather than a virtue.

• For kettles: whether it can hold a temperature, and for how long. Reaching 180F is easy; still being at 180F ninety seconds later is the feature you are paying for.
• For infusers: whether leaves have room to expand to roughly three times their dry volume. Everything else in that category is secondary to the geometry.
• For teapots: heat retention, strainer width, and whether the basket lifts out.
• Everywhere: what touches the water, because it is the specification makers most often decline to publish and their silence is informative.

The consequence is that the cheapest correct answer often wins. That is not a pose. A fifteen-dollar thermometer genuinely does the job of a hundred-dollar kettle, and we say so on the pages where the kettle is the thing we would earn more from.

Step 5 — Name who should skip it

Every pick on this site carries a “skip it if” line, and at least one item per roundup is something we tell you not to buy at all. The tea ball is the clearest example: it is a real product, plenty of people own one, and there is no situation where it is the better choice.

A roundup where every product is wonderful is a roundup that has not made a decision, and it is usually a roundup written to maximize the chance of a click on something.

What we never publish

• A price we did not check. Prices render only from the live price data, with the date they were checked. When there is no fresh price, the button reads Check price rather than showing you a stale number.
• A star rating or review count. We have no first-party ratings, so there is no rating to publish and no Review or AggregateRating markup anywhere in this site’s structured data.
• A test result. There have been no tests. No boil times, no thermal measurements, no tastings.
• An ASIN we did not retrieve. Product links currently resolve to a tagged Amazon search rather than a specific listing, because a remembered product ID can point at the wrong item or a dead page.
• A credential nobody holds. No expert panel, no certifications, no “years of experience” framing.

What would make us change a pick

• A manufacturer publishes a specification that contradicts what we recorded.
• A product is discontinued or persistently unavailable.
• A reader points out an error we can verify.
• A better-specified product appears in the category at a comparable price.

What would not: a commission rate. If a better product pays less, it still wins, and the arrangement is written out on the disclosure page.

Brewing figures

Temperatures, steep times and ratios come from published guidance and are attributed on every page where they appear, most often to Art of Tea’s brewing guide. Where two credible sources disagree we say so rather than picking one and presenting it as settled.

We have run no brewing trials. If a figure on this site is ever one we measured ourselves, it will say so explicitly.

Found something wrong?

Tell us and we will fix it and log the change. The editorial policy covers how corrections are handled, and the contact form is the fastest route.