“It is not difficult, for example, to heat up a pot of water. But really, you’re heating five gallons of water in a giant stock pot on a tiny New York stove, and you’re forced to angle the pot in a way that makes part of the gas flame lick out over the edge, just enough so that after an hour, which is how long it takes to get five gallons of water to 160 degrees on a single burner, the oven mitt that was hanging on the wall behind the pot catches fire—and suddenly things become difficult. Suddenly you’re using kitchen tongs to pull the smoldering oven mitt off its nail—and into the water you just spent an hour heating up. This is demoralizing. And morale continues to tank when you finally have your five gallons of 160-degree water and realize that if you pour 14 pounds of grain into it, then basic laws of water displacement dictate that the mixture will no longer fit your six-gallon pot. So you decide to pour the water into the grains, rather than the other way around, and you try to transfer 45 pounds of piping hot water into the only large-enough container you have, which happens to be a round cooler with an impressive capacity but a smallish mouth, and the water ends up mostly missing the mouth and tipping over the cooler full of grains—all of this happening just before your roommate comes home and wants to know why there’s an inch of scalding liquid and a pile of wet barley on the kitchen floor.”