Lady tasting tea | Hacker News Reader

Lady tasting tea

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176 pointsmomonga80 comments

Wasn't this demonstrated by the Royal Chemical Society that pouring the milk into the tea creates a detectable trace of caramelization of the milk sugar or protein denaturation due to the momentary high temperature on the milk while the tea:milk ratio was very high at the initial pour?

https://www.vahdam.com/blogs/tea-us/milk-first-or-last-the-s...

That wouldn't undermine or deter from the point:

> The null hypothesis is that the subject has no ability to distinguish the teas

Since the hypothesis was invalidated, we can begin investigating _how_ she's able to distinguish it, which is what you're getting at.

I've always preferred the taste of milk-first, and it never crossed my mind that the difference wasn't noticeable.

I didn't realise it was a class marker until someone described it as "a bit MBT" (milk before tea.)

Apparently where they were from this subtle social shading really mattered.

Apparently milk before tea is lower class because poor people would want to avoid cracking low quality porcelain with hot tea. Fascinating!

Was that a genuine concern? Boiling water has a fixed maximum temperature. Not sure that room temp->90C is all that different from room temp to 100C for ceramic.

With a very thick glass, you definitely can crack it with boiling water. I didn't know if earthenware is similarly susceptible, but anything that is both brittle, and has a high enough rate of thermal expansion would be.

And low enough rate of thermal conductivity.

Sure, thermal expansion can crack ceramic. More my question is, did this really happen? The operating parameters for a ceramic cup are well known. A cup that is ok for 90C tea vs 100C tea seems like terrible design which would run you out of business if your competitor could make cups that were not known for breaking if you did not let the water cool long enough.

It’s not about 100C vs 90C, it’s about the sudden change from 25C to 95C, versus a gradual change from 25C up to ~70C.

It's more about time than the final temperature.

When you pour hot tea into an empty cup, the innermost layer of the cup goes from room temp to ~80C within a fraction of a second.

When you pour hot tea into a cup that already contains a fair amount of milk, it goes from $milkTemp to ~60C gradually over a few seconds as the tea mixes with the milk, giving enough time for the cup to expand evenly.

Cracking teacups was a concern.

I visited a fascinating museum with a ceramics collection, and it included an exhibit with a history of ceramics. Earlier ceramics had this problem. Apparently, bone china -- with some bone mixed in -- created a tougher material that was less prone to cracking under the rapid temperature shock. As ceramics improved over the decades, it became a non-issue.

I suspect that letting the heat spread out over a larger area at the bottom of the cup might have alleviated cracking. That's a speculation of course.

I wonder if this is why the Russians drank tea from glasses. My mom has some lovely Russian tea glasses with silver holders.

Granted, I have only ever had access to modern materials, but that feels like a basic a QC check during manufacturing. Pour boiling water straight into the cup. Designs that fail need to be reworked to be thinner/thicker/baked differently.

Essentially, the materials hadn't been invented, or were not widely known. The people who were manufacturing hard china kept their recipes a secret. Adding bone dust to the ceramic made it tough enough to withstand the temperature swing.

Also, mass manufacturing was in its infancy.

Milk before tea cannot still be a class marker, though. To do milk before tea necessitates the use of a teapot but I would say using a teapot makes one seem more posh than poor.

However, I do wonder whether some people are confused and think milk first means the teabag goes into the milk. This would explain why some people seem inexplicably horrified by it.

This is all from pre tea bags, when everyone used teapots, I'd assume.

The milk first and milk second thing has been around for as long as I can recall (I'm 53). Mis and mif! Never a class marker but just a preference.

My mum was half Manc and half Devonian (to one gen) and my dad is half Irish and half North Hants to one gen. I can easily claim all UK nationalities within two generations and German within four. Cornwall, 14th gen via mum, Padstow. I've got the lot!

In reality, you end up with a tea pot going cold with stewed tea in it and you wack some milk and tea in a cup.

Get a grip and drink tea and stop pontificating about the stuff. Its just tea. Yummy!

It's not so important these days since most ceramics don't shatter much.

But is said to still be a class marker.

I drink a fair amount of tea, and I never understood why people put milk in their tea. Can you explain what you like about the sensation of milk in tea?

I am genuinely curious because this seems to be a near-universal thing in Britain, and I just... don't get it.

Milk makes tea far less astringent.

It also binds with some other compounds making them less active too, but the astringency is an easy point to understand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/mb1tku/tempering_astri...

Why wouldn’t the same thing happen when the milk first hits the tea?

Id anything I would think there should be more caramelization in the TBM case because there should be more heat in the larger volume of tea and so the milk should get hotter at the point of initial contact.

That's exactly what was found and what GP said.

Ah, right, sorry. Polarity error.

> detectable trace of caramelization

I was alway told the milk-last 'scalds' the milk, and I do prefer the taste of milk-first, especially with the first pour of the pot.

If making teabag tea, it's better to let the tea brew (and cool) for a few minutes before adding milk. Adding the milk just after the water gives a terrible cup.

If you want to receive the health benefits from the tea then you should brew for at least four minutes, I've heard. This does only really apply if the tea is of at least reasonable quality, of course.

Of course, any article mentioning tea, must include a reference to ISO 3103 — A Standardized Method for Brewing Tea[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

producing "a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea" - h2g2

I think the song TUSA, in which Ginger Baker describes the process of making Tea is also a required reference for any articles on the topic.

- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DTuXBoA688Y

The ISO link[1] says this standard has been withdrawn however.

[1] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:3103:ed-1:v1:en

> Thus, if and only if the lady properly categorized all 8 cups was Fisher willing to reject the null hypothesis – effectively acknowledging the lady's ability at a 1.4% significance level (but without quantifying her ability).

Important to realize though, that failure to categorize all 8 doesn't prove anything either. It just means this one experiment isn't conclusive in itself (at 95% confidence).

It's good to be aware of how easy it can be to get a false result by chance, but it's imo a worse statistical sin to propose that not proving something is proving the opposite (a mistake I see quite often).

This is generally good advice, but isn't it inappropriate in this specific instance?

The lady's claim was (allegedly) that she has a perfect ability to distinguish between the tea-milk orders, so in that case even a single failure is indeed enough to reject her claim.

We can't rule out her success rate being significantly greater than 50-50, but even a single failure puts some bounds on her maximum success rate.

>> The lady's claim was (allegedly) that she has a perfect ability to distinguish between the tea-milk orders

I believe you added the word "perfect" which makes a substantive difference. I think this highlights the complications that get involved when trying to turn a simple proposition into an meaningful claim:

- Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with > 50% reliability with 95% confidence (what Fischer did)

- Can we prove that person X can observe taste of tea with 100% reliability with 95% confidence (not statistically possible)

- Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with > 50% reliability with 95% confidence (only possible if this person guesses wrong more often than randomly)

- Can we prove that person X cannot observe taste of tea with 100% reliability with 95% confidence (just need one example)

The probability of guessing all eight correctly is 0.5^8 (or roughly 0.39%). The chances of such a thing happening by mere fluke are quite slim. Now personally, I would have preferred a few more glasses to be even more certain, but hey, for all practical purposes those results do seem fairly credible.

Minor, but no it's 1/(8 choose 4) = 1/70 because there are 4 tea-first, 4 milk-first, and the lady tasting tea knows this.

Once the locations of the four tea-first cups are decided, the locations of the remaining milk-first cups are completely determined. (And there are 8 slots for those first 4 cups, hence 8 choose 4).

Ah yes, I stand corrected! In that case I suppose more trials really would have made the results more convincing, too....

I wonder whether pouring them together in addition to the first or second cases would be useful for helping to ascertain how keen the sense was.

Also, you need to consider your prior probabilities. If you performed an experiment that showed, 0.001<p<.05 that the sun has spontaneously stopped undergoing fusion, I wouldn't be very worried.

> in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all eight cups correctly.

Men: inventing new statistics methods to prove a lady wrong

Lady: is right

> upper classes pour first the tea, while the lower classes poured the milk first

this is because of the fear that boiling water will crack your best tea cups?

Good tea cups would never crack from boiling water, unless they were frozen first. Tea first is probably due to the fact that everybody wants tea, but not everybody wants milk, and some people want to pour their own amount of milk. You offer tea, they accept, you pour tea, you offer milk.

>lower classes poured the milk first

>Good tea cups would never crack from boiling water

That's sort of the point OP was making, I think. Poor folks wouldn't be able to afford good quality tea cups?

That’s one reason. The other one is that when you have a small amount of total milk, you have to make sure there’s enough for everyone. By pouring milk first you can more easily measure how much milk you pour per cup.

To me when I first came across this in college it was fascinating. I think any stem field should be taught about these statistical methods.

The power of being able to put an objective answer on any personal claim (e.g. mint gives me a headache) with statistics & a blind design is a very powerful tool to approach fields where our science just isn't good yet (psychology, health, etc).

I'm pretty sure they are taught this. There's a different between taught and having an in-depth understanding of what makes a good experiment.

Maybe they are, I don't know what's taught in a CS major, but a shocking number of my coworkers don't seem to understand the basics of statistical sampling which makes me wonder if they even had 2 courses on it.

And "The Lady Tasting Tea" by David Salsburg is a nice history of statistics; 29 chapters, a little over 320 pages. [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001; ISBN 0-8050-7134-2 (PB)]

George Orwell has entered the chat

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

... one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

Right, because it's much harder to measure a specific amount of milk in isolation than to eyeball how much of it you've just added to something else.

If you were concerned about regulating the amount of milk you were adding, tea first wouldn't even be a possibility.

I assume you are being sarcastic.

Drinking vessels come in all different sizes, from dainty little tea cups to mugs that hold an entire litre.

Measuring the milk requires both measuring the steep time exactly, and using a separate measuring cup. This wastes time and adds unnecessary cleanup.

Stirring as you add milk to the tea allows you to tell exactly the right amount for that cup (and for how long the tea was steeped) based on the colour of the beverage.

Measure is not being used as a literal verb. It's being used as an approximate measure. The same way we measure how much time we spend doing a task without a clock.

No it's not. Read again

> measure a specific amount of milk in isolation than to eyeball how much of it you've just added to something else

Yes, it is. They are measuring the milk in isolation, which in this instance means to pour (and measure with your eyes) as it fills the empty container before the tea. Whereas you can't really measure how much the volume is changing (eyeballing) in isolation.

Think of it as the difference between measuring a liquid in a container and eyeballing a liquid in another liquid.

The line where he points out that you need to stir continuously is important. He's saying that by mixing the milk and tea reliably, you can eyeball the colour of the tea. Indeed, this helps you regulate the flavour over multiple cups as the tea may be stronger (and therefore darker) if you have not removed the tea leaves. Conversely humans are terrible at measuring volumes in isolation in a container thar may differ in size.

If you're concerned about regulating the tea (to water) to milk ratio, i.e., obtaining a reliable flavour), milk first wouldn't even be a possibility.

> Conversely humans are terrible at measuring volumes in isolation in a container tha[t] may differ in size.

Most people use their teacups more than once.

Even among people who don't, disposable cups, having been mass-produced, are all the same size.

People however don't tend to have perfectly uniform cups even in their own home, and whenever outside one's home, the chances are very low that somebody can make accurate adjustments for a new vessel due to our well documented inability to compare volumes across different vessels.

Further the milk first method cannot account for differences in tea strength across brewings.

If we take the amount of times/chances milk first could lead you astray vs. the amount of times tea first plus stirring as you pour could lead you astray, the former is oviously greater and more likely.

I saw somewhere here somebody talking about the different ways the milk sugars might caramelise with the two methods being a factor, and obviously the article suggests there is a difference between the two methods in terms of flavour, but in terms of reliability of flavour, the latter option is obviously more reliable.

I take my tea black and unsweetened anyway, unless I'm drinking Hong Kong style milk-tea that is... then all bets on my blood-sugar levels are off...

I measure the amount of milk by the colour it turns the tea. That's easy, and works the same for any size and shape of cup. Measuring how much milk you've poured into the bottom of a cup is much harder (especially when you want a small amount of milk, so it'll be a little puddle at the bottom of an opaque cup).

Not mentioned here is the lady’s name, Muriel Bristol.

I have also heard that this is a different way with 6 cups. This matters because 6C3 = 6! / (3!(6-3)!) = 20. That 1/20 chance of getting all 3 cups right is said to be the basis for the 5% significance cutoff for p values.

Another basis for the 5% cutoff is the (even earlier) Poisson distribution, with zero expected events, 3 observed. In this case, the probability of occurrence by chance is 1/e^3, which is just under 5%. In other words, the 5% p value is analogous to “3 strikes you’re out” because the probability of 3 uncommon events or exceptions is <5%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Bristol

> The woman in question, phycologist Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup.

Missed that, but still think commentary on the origin of the 5% rule for p values is of interest.

The 1967 British TV series The Prisoner, episode A Change Of Mind, prescribes the milk-first method, as part of a general instruction on how to make “a decent cup of tea”.

To solve this debacle, I only brew my tea in milk. Much better taste.

I'd rather just plain tea than water tea + milk, it just seems the worst of both worlds to me.

Jesus Christ I hope you're joking with the brewing tea in milk.

That's terrifying.

There are more teas in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

For example Kashmiri noon chai is tea boiled in milk for about an hour with baking soda before adding ice. It is then aerated by pouring between cups to make it slightly foamy.

Not sure what's terrifying about it, terrifyingly tasty!

Also several cultures around the world do that pretty commonly.

I do this with 'spiced chai' (cardomom or other spice teas). It gives a delicious full flavour, but ugh no cow milk please. Oat or almond.

My father-in-law does that with coffee. Fill a mug with milk, add two scoops of instant coffee, 60 seconds in the microwave at 800W, stir, another 10-30 seconds in the microwave, stir, drink. He won't have it any other way.

Always tell this story how today stat evolve out from experimental design and becomes non-baynesian

Very interesting. What are some other hypothesis, provoking random articles?

Berry. I hate tea with milk.

I heard about this recently but I can't remember where. Was the topic of this tea test on a podcast or something recently?

There was a post here about it, a couple months ago, I think

I found what I was thinking of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPCfDe8TfJQ

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