What is the rational way to butter toast? Brew coffee?
Heh, I and my wife recently did some experiments with our coffee consumption, which resulted in our switching from our long-preferred brand (“Davidoff”) to a cocktail made out of two brands.
The first brand (“Cubana”) is relatively expensive, poor-flavored, poor-tasting but well-caffeinated and the second one (“Jardin”) is relatively cheap, good-tasting, good-flavored but less caffeinated. We mix them 50⁄50 when we want more caffeine (rarely) or 30⁄70 when we want good balance of flavor, caffeine and taste (most of the time).
The reason we started exploring brands other than Davidoff was because its counterfeit percentage (as subjectively perceived by us) was above 33%, which is too high for a relatively expensive brand. We started exploring around and quickly learned than cheap brands almost always taste like crap, so we reallocated our coffee exploration budget to favor mid-range and expensive brands. The expensive brands usually failed to provide good price/performance ratio, so we settled on mid-range, where we finally found “Jardin” and “Cubana”.
To sum up, we minimized the cost, maximized taste, flavor and caffeine content, and made the scheme adaptable for our current needs (caffeine vs. taste).
I didn’t explicitly record P(brandX|goodtaste) and P(cheap|goodtaste), but I have a feeling that I’ll try that sometime on some similarly silly subject—just for the sheer fun of it :)
Flavor can implicitly refer to intensity, whereas taste typically won’t. In a more pedantic sense, flavor also often includes scents as the complete experience (and possibly sensation of hot/cold/pain for certain chemicals, such as menthol or capsaicin), whereas taste properly refers only to the five essential tastes that the tongue can detect.
Heh, I and my wife recently did some experiments with our coffee consumption, which resulted in our switching from our long-preferred brand (“Davidoff”) to a cocktail made out of two brands.
The first brand (“Cubana”) is relatively expensive, poor-flavored, poor-tasting but well-caffeinated and the second one (“Jardin”) is relatively cheap, good-tasting, good-flavored but less caffeinated. We mix them 50⁄50 when we want more caffeine (rarely) or 30⁄70 when we want good balance of flavor, caffeine and taste (most of the time).
The reason we started exploring brands other than Davidoff was because its counterfeit percentage (as subjectively perceived by us) was above 33%, which is too high for a relatively expensive brand. We started exploring around and quickly learned than cheap brands almost always taste like crap, so we reallocated our coffee exploration budget to favor mid-range and expensive brands. The expensive brands usually failed to provide good price/performance ratio, so we settled on mid-range, where we finally found “Jardin” and “Cubana”.
To sum up, we minimized the cost, maximized taste, flavor and caffeine content, and made the scheme adaptable for our current needs (caffeine vs. taste).
I didn’t explicitly record P(brandX|goodtaste) and P(cheap|goodtaste), but I have a feeling that I’ll try that sometime on some similarly silly subject—just for the sheer fun of it :)
What’s the difference between flavor and taste?
Flavor can implicitly refer to intensity, whereas taste typically won’t. In a more pedantic sense, flavor also often includes scents as the complete experience (and possibly sensation of hot/cold/pain for certain chemicals, such as menthol or capsaicin), whereas taste properly refers only to the five essential tastes that the tongue can detect.
Warning: I am an enthusiastic amateur home cook.