The discussion here reminds me of the lady tasting tea experiment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea
The only difference I can think of in these situations is the temperature of the bottom of the cup. Can this really detectably affect the taste? Maybe she was subconsciously feeling this?
Perhaps if they were using water fresh from the kettle the milk-first way was preventing the "scalding"
Milk is a factor. Weirdly for a country with a robust approach to pasteurisation, French milk is insipid.
In China, I couldn't even get hot enough water for coffee. The places I stayed offered water almost cool enough for a bath. I had thought I was clever, buying ground coffee in Beijing, but I might as well have carried a bag of sand.
Hey ho. Travel without privation is merely holiday.
If hot drinks are important to you, bring a travel kettle.
When adding the tea to the milk, the temperature of the milk will never exceed the final temperature of the mix. When adding the milk to the tea, it will.
Imagining a scenario where the milk starts at 0 degrees and the tea at 100 and having a 1:10 milk:tea ratio, the difference is whether the milk gradually heats up 0->90 or gradually cools down 100->90.
Thus, in one scenario the milk will experience more extreme temperatures that can "burn" it whereas in the other scenario it won't.
To me at least I'd say the difference is barely noticeable, if I had to guess I'd say that in a blind tasting I might be able to get 55% of my guesses right.
Like if I did this on the ISS, put milk in a cup, then moved it up into a hot blob of tea, am I adding tea to milk or milk to tea?
I have no clue how fast the temperature equalizes or how long it takes to scorch milk at different temperatures, but I heard about this as a kid and made the following thought experiment.
If I pour the milk first and then put in a single drop of tea, the milk at the surface of the drop would receive some flash heating, then equalize pretty fast to an average of their temperatures and then as the water turbulences away the resulting temperature would barely be above that of the original milk.
If I pour the tea first and put in a single drop of milk, the relative masses would equalize the temperature of the milk to pretty close to boiling, and it's gonna require a lot of drops before the milk cools down again.
Thus the time spent at higher temperature seems longer in the latter case. Assuming it matters for things like protein breakdown, and that those changes can affect the taste, then the question becomes: how slowly do we have to pour our tea for this to matter? I suspect I don't pour anywhere near slow enough.
> One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance.