Ask Fuzzy: Can you tell if the milk went in before the tea?
Question: Should we pour the milk or the tea first?
In Gulliver's Travels there was conflict over whether an egg should be cracked at the big or the little end, and today we still can't agree whether to pour the milk or the tea first.
What goes in first? Milk or tea?
Photo: Peter DowdScience can't say what taste you prefer, but it can suggest whether you can tell the difference. Are we really able to sniff the aroma, swish the brew onto our fore-palate, and know which went in first?
Camellia sinensis is the basis of the most popular drink in the world, after water. The botanical name is derived from a combination of Rev Georg Kamel, and sinensis which means 'from China'.
The complex flavours come from intimidating-sounding compounds such as phenols, flavonoids, isoflavones and terpenes, and the bitterness comes from catechin. Milk contains casein which binds to the catechins and reduces bitterness.
The first thing that happens when hot tea is mixed with cold milk, is that both change in temperature – the tea cools and the milk warms slightly. Overall, the effect is minor.
The heat affects the milk proteins, but in a properly designed experiment, can you tell?
This is where the scientific method kicks in and we can undo the human propensity to rely on preconceptions, assumptions and outright bias.
It's also hard work because there are so many ways we can accidentally affect the results of an experiment. You can read an example of a good experiment on the web by Tom Stafford. Theirs was a 'double blind', where neither party knew which cup was which.
This is to avoid traps such as the classic one involving a horse named 'Clever Hans'. Clever Hans was remarkable because he seemed that he was able to do simple arithmetic. He'd lift a hoof the right number of times to indicate the sum of say, five plus two.
Hans was certainly clever but it turned out he was watching the body language of his owner who would subtly nod his head until the correct number was reached. His owner fooled himself into thinking that Clever Hans knew the answer when all he really knew was that he'd get a reward for following his owner.
So can you reliably detect milk pouring violations? Unlikely. The subjects of Tom Stafford's experiments weren't any better than random.
Response by: Rod Taylor, Fuzzy Logic
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