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UPDATE: After approximately 300 uses of this Option-O Kettle, it has stopped heating up water. The unit still powers on, reads water temperatures, and has an audible “click” when you engage the power heating mode, but no longer heats up water. Because of this, WE DO NOT RECOMMEND purchasing this kettle, and our score for the kettle’s review has been adjusted from 4.2 down to 2.6 as a result.
Also, this product appears to be a scam: it was also sold via a Kickstarter campaign, with many people not receiving their kettles, or getting defective units. And as typical, Kickstarter themselves are no help to the folks who got scammed. The company behind this kettle used our review in their Kickstarter campaign without our knowledge or consent.
The company behind this kettle has disappeared. They are not responsive to emails. If you see a kettle of this design for sale, do not buy it. We are leaving this review up, but once again:
DO NOT BUY THIS KETTLE
At CoffeeGeek, our top ranking pour over kettle is the OXO Cordless Pour Over Kettle, which is also one of the highest rated reviews we’ve ever published on the website. The OXO kettle does have two issues: long term comfort, and availability. OXO says it’s still for sale, but it’s hard to find anywhere online. And the kettle is heavy and a bit difficult to hold and manage the pours with if it’s full of water.
That said, the OXO kettle is well priced, lightning quick, has a great pour spout, and if you’re only heating up 300-400ml of water, comfortable to use. It’s our top recommmended kettle for a reason.
We were recently contacted by a China-based company called X-Y Design, who are designing some original, innovative products for the pour over coffee world. They’ve already won Red Dot design awards for their pour over brewer and Samurai Hand Grinder, and their latest product is called the O-Kettle.
X-Y Design promoted several features of the O-Kettle: they claim it’s one of the fastest-to-boil pour over kettles on the market; their handle design is extremely comfortable and offers varied holds; and the interface, while simple, is also very functional. Here’s the company’s promotional video on the new kettle.
This kettle was put through a series of temperature tests, timings, heat up times to set points, and we also had a small focus group check out and use the kettle to get their opinions. We compared the kettle to an OXO Brew kettle, and a Timemore kettle.
We no longer recommend buying this Kettle.
The O-Kettle ships pretty basic, but also very environmentally friendly. While some protective plastic bags are used for the kettle and base, all the packaging is cardboard, including the stiff cardboard forms inside the box.
The kettle is all festooned in a matt black paint coat that has a nice texture to the hand. The handle, which is one of the star design elements of the kettle, is also in a matt black finish, but made from some kind of textured, super thick plastic material.
The lid is interesting. It is a dual wall design which keeps the top of the lid from getting too hot to touch (not just the lid knob, but the entire top of the lid). In testing, we’ll see how hot the lid gets, but my guess from observing it, it should always be safe to touch.
The pour spout ends at a position higher than the entire kettle. X-Y Design says they put a lot of engineering thought into the spout design and length, and feel this is more optimal for pour control than the spouts found on kettles like the Stagg EKG or the Hario Buono kettles.
The base for the O-Kettle is a heavy duty textured matt black plastic material, similar in touch to the kettle’s handle. The base rests on four very grippy rubber pads. There is only one control point on the base, and that is the control push knob. Where other kettles (notably the Stagg, but also the OXO) have the dial and displays separated, the O-Kettle has the display incorporated into the dial. It is an OLED display, so it stays all black except where the display information itself is presented.
The Kettle heating system is designed by Strix, who are the industry leaders in kettle heating systems. Everyone from Breville to Phillips to Bosch and many more companies use Strix technology in their water heating systems for kettles; O-Kettle picked one of Strix’ more advanced systems, based on a 1500W heater, with highly accurate water temperature controls and displays.
The O-Kettle’s max capacity is 900ml, and has MAX and MIN indicator text inside the steel interior that is pretty easy to read. The range of the kettle is from 104F to 212F (40C to 100C).
Here’s a roundup of the features on the O-Kettle:
The O-Kettle
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After setting everything up and rinsing out the kettle for its first use, we fired up the O-Kettle to check out its features and speed.
Plugging it into the wall outlet shows a little animation and display on the OLED control dial that you only see when plugging in the unit. Otherwise, the display stays black. Press the control button once, and you’ll read, in small letters, the word “SET:” and what the kettle is currently set for temperature. Below that in much larger letters is the active current water temperature. If you do nothing, the kettle will “click” on within a few seconds and start heating up the water. At any time, you can rotate the control dial to increase or decrease the set kettle temperature. Our kettle arrived set for Fahrenheit, but it can also be changed to Celsius. We recommend Fahrenheit because it gives you a finer level of temperature control than Celsius does, given the kettle is adjustable only in 1 full degree increments.
The O-Kettle is indeed fast, though our initial test timings didn’t quite match the company’s literature on the kettle. From 60F starting temperatures, we tested it reaching 212F, full boil, in 4:24 (I should note, they tested from 72F starting temperatures and claim it takes 3.5 minutes to boil).
The OLED display is quite nice, even if it obscured by your thumb or forefinger as you operate it. I also found myself wishing it was a tad brighter (especially for photography purposes). But the amount of information it displays is completely on point, and to the task at hand. There’s no superfluous information or graphics – it displays all the things you need to know in real time and in the right modes.
The Control Dial
Fairly straigthforward to use with a good presentation of information.
I found the kettle a lot more comfortable use – especially when full to its 900ml max amount – than the OXO digital pour over kettle. Very quickly I settled into a “pistol grip” hold of the kettle (more on that below) after trying the side bias and traditional holds.
We use an Acaia Pearl 2021 model scale (here’s our first look at that) for all our testing, and the Pearl scale has a real-time flow rate indicator, with a preferred zone between 2.5ml/sec and 6.5ml/sec; I try to keep things at 5ml/sec for most of of my pour over pours. With the OXO, by the time I have poured out 200, 225ml, my hand started to get tired trying to maintain a 5ml/sec pour. With the O-Kettle, I found things much more comfortable and controllable, even through 350mls poured out.
The O-Kettle is also extremely quiet. It might be early days and it may develop more typical kettle noises (cavitation sounds, water heating/vibration sounds against metal that most kettles have) and we’ll report back on that, but new, out of the box, it’s extremely quiet, and possibly the quietest electric kettle I’ve ever used. It’s even quieter than my Hario Buono stovetop kettle.
This might have to do with the double wall lid on the O-Kettle, which – on top of keeping the top of the kettle safe to touch – might reduce the operational noises of water heating up and boiling. Again, when we do our more full review, we’ll dive more into this.
Besides being lightning quick and extremely quiet, the O-Kettle has some nice features built in. Some are in the company’s promo material, but one I didn’t know about at all until I used the kettle:
The kettle has a little white LED light that shines out from the front of the base, onto your counter or tabletop, to indicate when the Kettle is actively on or in HOLD mode. When the kettle is active, the light is solid; when the kettle is in hold temperature mode, it blinks. It’s subtle and not disruptive or glaring, but can be easily spotted in most lighting conditions and on most counters. I really like design tweaks like this.
The small white dot in front of the base plate is a LED shining on the table, indicating the machine is in operation.
The handle design is the most obvious feature on the O-Kettle. It’s designed to offer a variety of holding positions, and also to keep the handle closer to the body of the kettle for easier controlled pouring ability. You can hold the kettle on a left or right bias angle if you put your thumb through the handle. You can also hold the handle traditionally, with your grip below the O ring.
But my preferred way very quickly became the pistol grip hold, as I called it. Your hand grips the handle but your index finger slides through the O ring, forming a kind of pistol grip action. I found this by far and away the most comfortable grip, and the one that afforded the most pouring control, especially when you’re trying to pour at flow rates of 5ml/sec or so, which most pour over experts seem to love.
A look at the big o-ring that is part of the O-Kettle's primary design modus.
I really liked the control and ability of the pour spout. Previously, I said the OXO Pourover Kettle’s pour spout was the best I’ve ever used; I’m leaning towards the O-Kettle now. It’s way, way better than the Hario Buono, at the very least. (I cannot compare it to the Stagg EKG from Fellow, as we don’t have a review sample to use).
The spout height is higher than the O-Kettle’s body, and it is still tucked in pretty tight to the vertical side of the kettle, which allows for better control. The cut and angle of the spout’s exit point really allows for good pouring with little-to-no water adhesion to the end of the spout. In our full review, I’ll test this more and compare it to other kettles.
The pour spout is well designed.
Yep, this kettle has a timer mode, and it’s pretty easy to get into, and has a nice start feature. After the O-Kettle reaches its set temperature, you press and hold the control dial for 3 seconds; the display will then show a 3… 2… 1… countdown, and start a digital timer. The idea is, you trigger the timer to start, let go of the button, grab the kettle, and wait for the countdown timer to get to 0, and start pouring.
The display shows your timer counting up, and below the minutes and seconds, you can see the hold water temperature actively displayed. To stop the timer, press the button once, and it goes back into hold temperature mode.
The kettle also has a hold temperature feature; this is turned on or off when the kettle is not active. Press and hold the dial button for a few seconds, and the word HOLD will pop up. Turn the dial left or right to turn the hold function on or off. When turned on, the kettle will maintain the set temperature for 60 minutes. When turned off, the kettle still holds the set temperature 10 minutes after it heats the water up to that temperature.
The O-Kettle also lets you turn the machine’s indicator sounds on or off, and switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit. When the kettle is off, press and hold the dial button until the word HOLD appears. Press the button again, and it displays “BUZZ” and you can use the control dial to turn the machine noises on or off. Press a third time, and UNIT is displayed, letting you pick C or F.
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The O-Kettle seems to be a slight evolutionary improvement in the pour over kettle sphere, especially when compared to first and second generation digital, dial a temperature pour over kettles. I’m not prepared to call this a third generation kettle – I don’t think we’ve seen that yet from any company – but the O-Kettle has some nice advancements in speed, pour ability, and handling, all at a nice price point.
I especially liked the handling and pour control of this kettle. The lack of operation noise was nice too, and the surprise of the subtle operation indicator (there’s no mention in the manual or on their website) was nice.
The user interface is well designed but I don’t know how well built it is for use over several years: it seems a bit flimsy and the control dial needs to stand up to a lot of use for this product to see 3, 5, 7 or more years’ use on your kitchen counter. In our full review, we’ll examine things like this more, and actually use the kettle over several months, in order to give a qualified opinion on longevity of the O-Kettle.
For now, it seems like an easy choice to make if you want a feature packed, fast digital control variable temperature kettle for pour over coffee. It has been available for sale in Asia already, and is coming to the USA and Canada this March (2022). The projected price is $130, at at that price point, could be a market leader.
As mentioned at the top, we no longer recommend this kettle. Do not buy it. Do not do business with this company.
If you enjoy and learn from this resource, please consider making a one time or recurring donation to help support our work and fund purchases for future reviews.
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