A nice lovely warm cuppa

[fliddy]

You are making a cup of tea. You get the stage where you have taken out the bag and you are just about to put in the milk when the phone rings. So to ensure your cup of tea is at a maximum possible temperature for when you return from the phone call and drink it. Do you add the milk now or when you return from the call?

[Panic Button]

Add milk now.

[Panic Button]

The reasoning being the tea will lose more energy when the temperature gradient is steeper (difference between temp of cup and surrounding air).

By adding milk now you will make the temperature gradient more shallow, so it will lose less energy.

[ugly_bob]

but...
If you add milk, you cool the liquid, so you're starting further down the curve already!
DONT ADD MILK YET
If it's a long conversation, make another cuppa. Nothing worse than a luke warm cup of tea!

[ChuckFickens]

microwave it after the call

[Jugglering]

Argghhh chuck.... microwaved tea is simply horrible !

[Rosetta]

Add the milk and take the bloomin thing with you. Loud slurps of tea might give the hint to the pesky caller lol.

[ChuckFickens]

tea is simply horrible!!!!

[sn�gged]

Add the milk and drink the tea... if the call is that important they'll phone back...

[Buenchico]

This is a standard school science question which, at my school, we studied at age 11. The correct 'scientific' answer is definitely to add the milk.

However, I prefer the suggestion putting the milk in and taking the tea to the phone! (Anyway, there's nothing in the question here to to specify that it's a landline in another part of the house. Perhaps it's a mobile in the tea-drinker's pocket? In which case he/she could pour the milk in with one hand, while answering the phone with the other).

Chris

[Jugglering]

LOL.. Chris... but what about when one dislikes milk ? I take my mugs of tea thus:- weak, black and no sugar... and in a porcelain mug please... somehow it just tastes better like that!

Chuck - I never liked tea either, until I discovered it was possible to take it without milk (and fairly weak too, to avoid all that tannin)...lol

[ChuckFickens]

I'm a coffee type person

Nobody wants to be talking to me in the morning until I've had my caffeine!!

[Jugglering]

lol Chuck... my work colleagues and I have one of them thar machines at work... and cos they get to work like over an hour before me (and leave similarly - I get in for 8am, they are there from 6:45 am onwards), they put the coffee on first... so I get a freshly brewed mug of coffee when I arrive at work.. I make the next one...etc.. (we take it in turns)..

When we first had the machine, we made a full jug of real coffee but let it stew ... it tasted horrible... plus the huge amounts didn't do any of us any good, so now we just make *enough* for those in work there and then and then brew up again as required at 9:30 am.. We ALL drink tea in the afternoon for some strange reason hehe..

[ChuckFickens]

every office/department where I now work has a coffee machine in it, when I first started the new job a few months back every time I got a call to go sort a problem in any part of the company the first thing I done was pour a coffee on arrival.

I soon realised that by mid afternoon I was twitching (not the bird watching type!) so much I could barely type :)

I've now cut down :)

P.s. you'd love where I work now :)

[heathfield]

Naturally there will be an initial temperature drop as the added milk is heated up by the tea. But then the fats in the milk slow down the rate of further cooling.