Taylor Connoisseur Series Tea Thermometer & Timer #516

I picked up this little gadget at Bed Bath & Beyond this weekend and have put it through vigorous paces over the last several days. Now I feel I've made enough notes for a useful review post.

The basic functionality is that it alerts you when your water has reached a desired temperature, then times the steep of a cup of tea.

The price is $20-$25, depending on where you shop. Look on-line if you're obsessed with finding a good deal, as you can save a few bucks.

Now, the details....

The best way I've found to use it is in a cooling vessel. If you heat your water in a kettle, pour water into a vessel for it to cool to the desired temperature, then pour the water from there into the teapot in which you will steep the tea.

After trying several different vessels for cooling the water, I have settled on a one-cup measuring cup. This allows me to measure my water precisely and allows the thermometer to be covered in at least an inch of water when I use only 4 oz of water (normal for me).

It is very portable, slightly smaller than a modern tattoo gun, and transporting it back & forth to the office for several days has not resulted in any mishaps.

The wide-open top of the measuring cup allows the water to cool fairly rapidly to the desired temperature while still allowing the thermometer to be mounted effectively.

I plan on tinkering with the mount later to make it more doubleplus good good, but its default configuration is just fine. Its contact points are covered with silicone, which is far more heat resistant than you will need for tea water and should prevent damage to porcelain and other surfaces from contact with the mount.

My over-all impression is that this is a highly functional device and worth the price. But I do feel there is room for critique.

The computer is supposed to turn itself off after a period of non-use, but I have seen no circumstance under which this feature actually works. I always have to turn it off by holding down a certain button for three seconds. I hope to find the solution to this soon, because battery conservation is important.

Every button press comes with a *beep*, and one can do a fair bit of button pressing to get the settings just right. When the water reaches the desired temperature, and when the steep time completes, the device beeps some more and flashes a spiffy green LED display.

The beeping is pretty unobtrusive, but I do wonder if people in my department at work have considered homicide.

The system comes with preset times and temperatures for a variety of teas: white, green, black, puerh, oolong, darjeeling, and herbal. You can select one of the presets, then modify the steep time and water temp in a reasonably intuitive way.

This can involve a fair bit of button-mashing beeping, though. And you can not, to my knowledge, add your own preferred presets. I just pick one that's close and then change the time & temp to suit my preferences. Unfortunately, it appears necessary to change the settings manually.

I'd like it a bit more if I could change the volume or just turn off button-mashing beeping, but it's not a big deal.

I have become quite fond of this device already and like it lots.

Edit: Follow-up thoughts....

This little gadget has really won me over after about a week of use because of its ease of use and usefulness in making tea under those sleepy low-light conditions of morning.

Some of my favorite morning teas reward precise handling. And morning time is when it's the most challenging to fuss over precise temperatures and steep times.

I've made two cups of O-Cha's Miyabi sencha in a dark room, guided to sencha perfection by this little device. As Rachael Ray (yeah, what of it...) would say, "Yum-O!"

Additional Edit:

Some of the presets for this device are set to 212° F, which I consider to be a design flaw in this case.

In order for the thermometer to beep and light up, allowing the timer sequence to be initiated, the water temperature must exceed the target temperature, then cool down to the target temp.

Under normal circumstances in most locations inhabitable by humans, water can not be heated above 212° F with normal heating processes. In fact, it is often simply not possible to make water even reach this temperature at all using ordinary means.

Therefore, the user has to determine the temperature to which one can actually heat water locally, then modify the preset to a temperature slightly lower than this in order to use the device's temperature/timer sequence.

A more practical solution for teas requiring boiling water is simply to have another timer handy, which is activated when the boiling water is poured on the leaf.

And if you have to keep an additional timer around, this device's usefulness is greatly diminished.

I still like this device, and use it regularly, but in actuality, I find myself working around its flawed user interface most of the time, and often in conjunction with an additional timer (a meditation timer in my Treo).

Is it worth $20 to $25? For me, the answer remains yes. But I give it a qualified endorsement for the general public.