Metric vs English

[kh54s10]

I find that yeast are happiest fermenting in Celsius. They’re not very smart, and conversions are cumbersome.

I find that my yeast are happiest fermenting in wort! That way they don't have to do any math. They just have to eat sugar and fart co2.

I use both US Customary (though this is the first I have heard of the term) and metric. Linear metric to meters is easy, I can't get my head around kilometers though. Milliliters and liters seem simple as well as grams. The rest though????

 

[ArkotRamathorn]

Celsius is the only metric measurement I cannot stand. I understand it, I understand why its better, but I still hate it. Every other metric measuring standard makes total sense.

I still use pounds/ounces/gallons when I'm measuring macro ingredients like grains and hops, micro ingredients its easier for me to keep track using grams and such (150 grams of DME for a starter for example). It really depends, generally you buy grains by the pounds so I calculate a grain bill with pounds of grain, if you dont buy hops in bulk you buy 1oz packages of hops so you work around 1oz increments for hops, and I have lots of 1 gallon jugs handy so I'll just measure my water in 1 gallon increments.

Disclaimer: Metric makes sense to me, 100%, its so much better in a lot of ways, but I'm still going to do a lot of my measurements with imperial/standard whatever you wanna call it measurements.

 

[doug293cz]

I find that my yeast are happiest fermenting in wort! That way they don't have to do any math. They just have to eat sugar and fart co2.

...

And pi$$ ethanol

Brew on

 

[November]

I wish I could get myself over to celcius. The problem is that I've lived a farenheit life. Short of grabbing my smart phone I don't have a quick reference for celcius.

I should just set everything in my house to C, and just suffer for a week till it feels natural. The distances on the main highway from the border to Tucson are in km and I've gotten used to that...

 

[Rev2010]

I wish I could get myself over to celcius. The problem is that I've lived a farenheit life.

For me, brewing for four and a half years using the Celsius stick on thermometers that came with my Cooper's kits (still use those fermenters to this day) has really gotten me adjusted to Celsius.

As for the metric system, it's like most here have already said, it's just smarter and makes the most sense and that is why the large majority of the world use that system. Divisibles of ten. Whenever I have someone tell me how stupid the metric system is I ask them, "So you know how many inches in a foot yes?" then they respond, "Of course 12". Then I ask next, "How many feet are in a mile?" Then they say, "Oh... god I don't know". Then I tell them 5280. Then I ask them how many ounces in a gallon and most believe it or not don't know. So I point out how we have to remember all these ridiculous numbers whereas you don't have to with metric.


Rev.

 

[Wynne-R]

I think it’s a national embarrassment that US metrication seems to be going backwards. My brother says no big deal; it’s a software switch.

One of my neighbors just graduated high school and he doesn’t know a kilogram from a millimeter. I learned the Metric system in high school in the 70's.

A liter is a big quart, a meter is a big yard. The problem as I see it is with temperature. It hit 40C today in Texas, but that doesn’t play as well in the barbershop as complaining about 104F.

 

[helterscelter]

To confuse dates even more, the DoD approved format now DD-MMM-YYYY where month in the three-letter designation.

There are also the various programming methods to display dates as sequential(ish) numbers with the ever more common YYYYMMDD as it can sort numerically or as a text string.

See iso8601 if you're bored

 

[Kharnynb]

+15 C This is as warm as it gets in Finland, so we'll start here. People in Spain wear winter-coats and gloves. The Finns are out in the sun, getting
a tan.

+10 C The French are trying in vain to start their central heating. The Finns plant flowers in their gardens.

+5 C Italian cars won't start, The Finns are cruising in cabriolets.

0 C Distilled water freezes. The water in Vantaa river (in Finland) gets a little thicker.

-5 C People in California almost freeze to death. The Finns have their final barbecue before winter.

-10 C The Brits start the heat in their houses. The Finns start using long sleeves

-20 C The Aussies flee from Mallorca. The Finns end their Midsummer celebrations. Autumn is here.

-30 C People in Greece die from the cold and disappear from the face of the earth. The Finns start drying their laundry indoors.

-40 C Paris starts cracking in the cold. The Finns stand in line at the hotdog stands.

-50 C Polar bears start evacuating the North Pole. The Finnish army postpones their winter survival training awaiting real winter weather.

-60 C Korvatunturi (the home for Santa Claus) freezes. The Finns rent a movie and stay indoors.

-70 C The false Santa moves south. The Finns get frustrated since they can't store their Kossu (Koskenkorva vodka) outdoors. The Finnish army goes out on winter survival training.

-183 C Microbes in food don't survive. The Finnish cows complain that the farmers' hands are cold.

-273 C ALL atom-based movent halts. The Finns start saying "Perkele, it's cold outside today.

-300 C Hell freezes over, Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest.

 

[alphaomega]

@Kharnynb: Can't remember 2006 being that cold.

 

[Raisoshi]

It always gives me a laugh when I read something like "I added 10qt of water to my 5gal pot and infused 1oz of vanilla extract", I mean you just used 3 different units for the same thing!(volume)

Then again, you guys have been using these since you were young so of course for you it's not as hard as it is for me to compute that. It's not that easy to just change an entire country's way of counting things.

Being this is mostly a US forum I just adapt to the situation and use your units so I can be understood.

 

[Nomofett]

Temperature is much better with imperial. Celcius jumps hugely, imperial is easier to be accurate with. Living in a metric country right now it's annoying being cool outside and asking the temp and hearing people say it's going to be hot the next day cause it will be 2 or 3 degrees hotter.
Also it's annoying cause all the recipes I get online are imperial and all my equipment is metric

 

[alphaomega]

Temperature is much better with imperial. Celcius jumps hugely, imperial is easier to be accurate with.

No, it is not better. Nor is it worse. It is just another scale. YOU are just familiar with Fahrenheit, and therefore in the opinion that it is better.
The point of changing to metric, is not because it is superior, but standardized and in widespread use.

 

[Nomofett]

Easier I should say, or more precise for the vast majority places you see it, I don't ever see that it's 31.25 degrees when talking about the weather. So yeah, I'll stick with better
But metric is better for everything else (if your judging good/bad by ease of use and preciseness) i would love the US to change to metric because it's much better for just about everything

 

[Kharnynb]

Concidering wind chill, moisture effects etc, giving temperature in anything more than 1 degree celcius differences or about groups of 5 degrees fahrenheit is really all you need for "human use".

for brewing or such we use decimals in practically even the cheapest thermometers, though not often in recipes, since the differences are so minimal anyway.

 

[Nomofett]

My thermometers don't have decimal points, but mainly it's just in talking about the weather since I can't control my temps that precisely anyways.

 

[Kharnynb]

Weather temperature is too personal anyway.

25 celcius is hot for finland, normal for france and cold for spain.

 

[Onkel_Udo]

The point of changing to metric, is not because it is superior, but standardized and in widespread use.

Actually, with the exception of temperature (which is a push unless we are doing embodied energy calc's, etc where C wins again). Metric is actually superior in every way not just because it is standardized but because all the units are base 10 using the same scale/starting point.

Having grown up with the various joys of SAE/American Customary/"Standard"/etc, and then having lived in Germany/Austria for a few years I can say with complete confidence that there is no volume, length or weight that is better in inches, barrels, quarts, pounds...or the other 34,000 variants. Measurements of energy/work are still harder to fathom but that is because they are hard in any set of measurement.

Being a car nerd, mechanical and racer, horsepower and torque are still two of the most laughable standards. This is particularly so when speaking of engines, engines in cars, driven wheel horsepower, SAE net, and so on. The same vehicle can logically have ratings from 350 to 200 horsepower and all of them are "right".

 

[WI_Wino]

Where imperial measures really shine is when you have to estimate shorter distances with no tools. The length of an average man's foot is 12 inches (or one foot). A hand span is about 9 inches. A walking pace is about 6 feet or two yards. The distance between your thumb knuckle and base knuckle is 1 inch. Extend your arm out the side, distance from your nose to the tips of your fingers is 3 feet.

 

[ZebulonBrewer]

In my old job where we used high-output lamp arrays for structural heating, we used hundreds of 1000W lamps for everything. Watts are great, they are simple: Joules per second. Know what's not simple? When the older engineers and managers ask for everything "in BTU's".

BTU's per what, you ask? it varied. And sometimes they implied flux, like BTU/ft^2/s would be asked for as "Gimme that answer in BTU's".

The british thermal unit sounds like it should make easy sense. The energy required to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree F, but the math just sucks and it needs to die a horrible death.

 

[Backwoodsbrewing]

Boy I opened a real can of worms

 

[Nomofett]

Haha. I work overseas teaching English at a conversation school. I work at lots of different schools due to the nature of my job and many times I will end up at a school with British co-workers. This is nothing compared to the debates we have (most are in good fun, but it's surprising how many think there's is the "correct" english. British cause they spoke it first, and Americans because it's more widely used in business, media, etc..)
Good times.

 

[Rev2010]

It's not that easy to just change an entire country's way of counting things.

As with most things, it hasn't changed yet and likely won't for quite some time mostly due to money. The cost of switching is quite high but the longer we wait the more expensive it gets.


Rev.

 

[alphaomega]

As with most things, it hasn't changed yet and likely won't for quite some time mostly due to money. The cost of switching is quite high but the longer we wait the more expensive it gets.


Rev.

In Sweden we changed from driving in the left lane to the right lane in 1967. That was the right (pun intented) thing to do and that kind of change is best if everyone does at the same time.
Going metric does not necessarily need to be overnight, but could be gradual.

 

[Talgrath]

As I often point out about this, the math isn't even right there. A rod is 5.5 yards (approximately) and a hogshead is roughly 240 liters (or roughly 63 gallons) therefore 40 rods to a hogshead is about 3.5 yards per gallon. If grandpa Simpson's car got that sort of mileage it would be out of fuel before he could drive it home. It's a more subtle jab than people realize.

 

[donbrew]

I'll say it: the OP asked about English vs. Metric, not ASE vs. Metric.

Metric is not the same as English.

 

[Onkel_Udo]

In Sweden we changed from driving in the left lane to the right lane in 1967. That was the right (pun intented) thing to do and that kind of change is best if everyone does at the same time.
Going metric does not necessarily need to be overnight, but could be gradual.

Your example is good out of context but...

Like many things that SHOULD work well in the rest of the world, they work best in some place like Sweden or Norway. A relatively homogeneous, well educated, multi-lingual and affluent culture of very small (on a global level) scale population. I do not know about now but when I lived in Germany the first time in 1990, it truly was a Socialist (not communist or totalitarian) paradise. Difference in wages from the lowest blue color to a surgeon were no more than a factor of 2.5.

I am not belittling the accomplishment by any means but the scale and complexity as applied to the US is also unfathomable.

Metric is still our future but it requires something our governing bodies do not possess...the ability to make an unpopular decision and stick with it. Truthfully, why would they when they will be out of office for more than a decade before seeing the benefits.

 

[CreamyGoodness]

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ucurMr28dt0[/ame]

 

[Hoppity]

That first day in Sweden '67 must have been crazy. I learned on the right side of road; every time I've driven on left side I get totally disoriented, to the borderline of dangerous, especially at merges.

 

[NickTheGreat]

Boy I opened a real can of worms

Metric can or imperial can???

 

[Talgrath]

Metric can or imperial can???

English Imperial or American Imperial?