An Observation

“Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month quotes: never take two chronometers to sea. Always take one or three. Meaning, if two chronometers contradict, how do you know which one is correct?”
— Wikipedia on Unit Testing

It seems I have another tip to add to the four I gave yesterday.

  • Trust but verify

You see, in yesterday’s post, I said I was going to try my hand at cheese making. Gretchen and I bought ourselves a basic cheese-making kit for Christmas and tried a recipe today. It called for pasteurized milk. We only had raw milk, so we pasteurized it by heating it to 145 °F for 30 minutes. I used my Thermapen to measure the temperature. Gretchen noticed that the kit came with its own dial thermometer and I asked her if she would clip it on the pot so I would not drain the battery on mine. She did and it read — within our ability to tell — the same as the Thermapen. She went and fished around in the kitchen drawers. I asked her what she was doing as she pulled out our kitchen dial thermometer. ”Oh nothing,” she said nonchalantly and stuck it in the warm milk on the stove. It read 160 °F.

Hmmm…

Did I mention that this batch of beer — the one I described as “amazing” — is the first one I have made since I got the new thermometer?

2 Replies to “An Observation”

  1. Hey, thanks for stopping by knifecitycreamery and liking my friend Liz’s list. She and I also brew. I’ll set your site up in my RSS feed. Looking forward to reading!

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