Seb: Hello and welcome to our time. My name Seb. I'm one of the co-founders here and this is a video series that we use to answer the questions that you send to me, no matter how big or small they are. Anything about coffee, you can send it straight to me and we'll answer it in a video coming up. So today's video is based on a question that James asks, and it's if you warm up your ceramic cup before you put espresso in it, does this actually make your coffee taste better or is this just a placebo? So this is a really great question because it's something that a lot of people probably do by habit, but not a lot of people probably think about why they do it. So the situation is that if you're about to pull your shot of espresso at home or even in a cafe, you're always taught traditionally to take the cup to put a lot of hot water in it first to make sure the cup is really, really hot. And so when you brew your espresso and it goes in, the espresso should then hold its temperature for longer. If you put it into a cup, that's pretty cold and the espresso is obviously going to cool down really, really fast, which is not what a lot of people are looking for. So the question is, does this really make the coffee taste better? And the answer is kind of the answer is really obviously, like everything we do at timely, it's going to be based around what you actually like the most out of your espresso. There are a lot of people that when they taste their espresso for the first time, they're expecting it to be at a certain temperature.

Seb: And if that's the case for you and you really enjoy that kind of hot or warm espresso, then you should 100% be warming it up. But there's nothing really chemically that's happening to the coffee that would make it taste better at a certain temperature. So obviously, some coffees are going to taste better at one temperature than another. But that's more about the coffee itself then really about whether or not you're going to be heating up your espresso cup. So if you brew your espresso and it cools down over 10 minutes and that's your ideal temperature, or you brew it into a cold cup and it reaches the same temperature faster and it tastes great to you, then that's pretty much the exact same thing. So there's not really any hard and fast rules and so much so that I remember having a coffee at a cafe not probably a couple of years ago where they were experimenting with different things and they were actually keeping their espresso cups in the freezer. So the idea is that there's no hard and fast rules. It's really about what's going to taste best to you. So when we're actually assessing coffee around a table and we're cupping coffee, we always have a rule where we never make any decisions about a coffee while that coffee is hot. So we always want to make sure that that coffee is cooled down at least to room temperature and tasted again. And if it still tastes good, then we know that coffee is probably going to have a little bit of life left in it. Seb: It's going to last as a green product for a little bit longer and we're probably going to get a lot more value out of that coffee as well. So we have a rule, you never buy coffee hot, and that just goes to show that coffee can taste good at a lot of different temperatures. So again, if you like your espresso are really hot, then make sure you walk a cup. But if you don't, then and you're enjoying that, then make sure you do that as well. It's really about what works for you, making sure that it's nice and consistent and really just kind of experimenting enough to find that sweet spot where you're really getting the most out of the coffee that you're brewing in, you're enjoying. And that's pretty much the answer to your question, James. It's kind of unfortunately, there's no hard and fast rule. So thank you very much for your question, though. I really love getting these questions about some of the more obvious things that maybe we don't consider all the time. It's really great to have these questions and just to be able to talk about them, not only how we approach them timely, but to be able to kind of think about in more detail why we do these things. So if anyone's got any questions, make sure you send them through to me at seb@timelycoffees.com.au And I'll get to everything in a video coming up pretty soon. Thanks very much and see you next time.