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Making an international standard cup of tea

Tom Scott · 2.7M views · 2018-04-09 · 3:34

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Overview

Tom Scott follows the ISO 3103 / BS 6008 standard to make an international standard cup of tea, using specialist tasting equipment. The video shows how precisely the standard is specified.

On Hacker News

Used to illustrate that the standard targets consistency rather than taste, and to discuss what standardization is for.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2018–2023

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Cooking & foodDocumentaries & storytellingPhysics & space (other)
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teaiso 3103standardizationtom scottbritish standards

What people said

crzyman · 2023-05 · Recommendation

I find this to be a close cousin of Tom Scott's "Making an international standard cup of tea" video ( [VIDEO] ). And very related to Tom Scott's "The US government will sell you freeze-dried urine" ( [LINK] ) and Veritasium's "The world depends on a collection of strange items. They're not cheap" ( [LINK] ) They bring forward the idea that standard/pure/repeatable items aren't intrinsically "good" or "enjoyable". But that doesn't make them not useful or valuable in other contexts. It also offers some food for thought when it comes to what metrics we decide to put value in. We may like the idea of a particular metric, or what we think it represents, but that doesn't make it worth optimizing for. A metric without context is useless, and taking a holistic view of what makes something worth doing allows us to make more informed decisions.

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dharmab · 2021-03 · Reference

That's how the ISO standards body works- you pay access for the spec to fund the ISO's development of standards. [VIDEO]

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mrguyorama · 2018-07 · Reference

An elaboration by Tom Scott: [VIDEO] TL;DR is that the standard is used for the most consistent tea, not most tasty/enjoyable tea

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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