Are you drinking stale coffee?

I came across the following quote in a New York Times article a day or two ago:

At my local Starbucks, I asked the young barista who took my order (grande 1 percent latte) how hot the store brews its coffee. “We brew it at 200 degrees,” she said. (That is also the standard recommended by the Specialty Coffee Association of America.)

But the serving temperature is lower than McDonald’s was back then. “We let it sit for a half-hour,” she continued, “so it is about 170 or 180 when we serve it.”

I wonder how common this is in practice to brew and serve at these different temperatures. My home brewing has of late been using an Aeropress and the Aeropress FAQ had the following to say about stale temperature:

5. The instructions for the AeroPress recommend using 175° F (80°C) water. That doesn’t seem hot enough. Why don’t you recommend a temperature closer to boiling?

In developing the AeroPress we spent more time on taste-testing various brewing temperatures than on any other tests. Our tasters ranged from casual coffee drinkers, to coffee aficionados, to professional coffee tasters and consultants. Every single taster preferred brew made at 165° F to 175° F. They said the hotter brews were ok, but the 165° F to 175° F (74° C to 80° C) brews tasted best.

Books often recommend a brewing temperature of 195° F to 200° F (91° C to 93° C). This is good for conventional brewing methods that pass hot water through a bed of coffee. In this method, the water rapidly cools so the lower part of the bed is operating at a lower temperature. However in the AeroPress all of the coffee particles contact the same water temperature during the stirring phase.

I recent picked up a temperature-controlled kettle so it seems that I'll have some experimenting to do. I've also been looking into the option to source my coffee beans direct from a local micro-roaster. As time wears on it seems I'm becoming more and more a coffee snob.