Happy Thought for 30 September 2022

Have a Happy Thought: 

You’re not insane for insisting that your cup of tea is made in your very particular way.

Specifically if you have milk with your tea.

Because it turns out that the tea and milk react differently, depending on whether the tea is poured into milk (milk-first), vs milk poured into tea (tea-first).

Being American, where tea is only a hobby and only then for only some people, I don’t fully understand how important this is. But I’m sure some people reading this have capital-O Opinions.

Here’s perhaps some of an explanation for why you have those Opinions.

So milk contains fats and proteins that are hydrophobic. If you pour milk into tea those hydrophobic globules get all separated, and then scalded by the piping hot tea. That scalding gives the milk fats and proteins a specific flavour (some describe it as kind of a caramel flavour).

If you pour the milk into the cup first, the incoming hot tea does not have the same globule-scattering effect, which means much less (if any) of the fats and proteins are scalded. So, you don’t get that caramel flavour.

So there you go!

For those statistics-nerds out there, you may be interested in reading a little bit more about how one woman’s ability to taste this difference led to our modern understanding of statistical significance and designing the right sample size for an experiment.

 

But you may want to read this over a cuppa.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/ronald-fisher-a-bad-cup-of-tea-and-the-birth-of-modern-statistics

 

 

 

Thanks to the Science History Institute for bringing this to our attention! https://twitter.com/SciHistoryOrg