Is it your impression that tea cools down faster than coffee?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
The only tea I like is iced. The sweeter the better.
And that is wrong. Both tea and coffee cool at the same rate. It may be that your coffee maker heats up the coffee to a slightly higher temperature than what you use when you make tea. Both drinks are mostly water.
I think this should be true but, for some reason, is not.
I don’t know. I only drink tea at Japanese restaurants (it’s free usually), and I use creamer in my coffee only to cool it off.
If only you had said “whip cream in my latte” instead of “creamer in my coffee”, you would have single-handedly crafted the most teaparty-infuriating single sentence response to BooMan’s question imaginable.
LOL.
I used to drink coffee black. I still enjoy it black, especially with cake or dessert. But it’s too hot, and I wants to drink it now. So, now I’m just used to creamer.
Well, I like the way Texas tea has cooled down to $58 a barrel.
What kind of wuss puts ANYTHING but more coffee in coffee??? The only tea sippers I know are from UT (texas). ‘Nuff said.
I’m not a scientist, but… unless the heat transfer coefficient of tea is different from that of coffee (and it really doesn’t seem like it should be!) the only driver of cooling is the temperature differential between the liquid and its surroundings.
On the other hand, maybe the mugs used for coffee and tea have different thermal conductivity.
Or maybe the tea isn’t as hot as the coffee to start with.
Or maybe the mass of your tea cup is smaller than the mass of your coffee cup.
Only a scientist knows!
The rate of heat loss of a body is proportional to the temperature difference between the body and its surroundings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer
Wouldn’t the molarity of the liquid determine the differences in heat loss?
Does one have tinier/more colloids than the other? Couldn’t that explain any difference, if it exists at all?
Well, which one do you think cools faster?
Tea and coffee may have a different amount/size of colloids in them, which could play a role in how fast they cool relative to each other.
I drink tea daily and yes, I think it cools far faster than coffee.
I believe it would be necessary to identify if both the tea and the coffee were caffeinated or not.
While the presence of caffeine will not directly effect the rate of temperature change on either beverage, as it would certainly be so soluble as to have no measurable colloidal effect, and Ho Ho, neither beverage would have a metabolism the caffeine could ‘speed up’* and thus increase its temperature (or decrease its rate of cooling)…
*PV=nRT
…the presence of caffeine would be required to maintain my focus on the question.
Depends. If you steep tea at the recommended temperature, it’s just not as hot as coffee to begin with.