No, I mean the temp of the beer at the time of bottling when the priming solution is introduced. Would you, for example, let a lager warm up to roughly room temperature prior to introducing the priming solution and bottling? Or does it really matter? I realize yeast activity will not begin until the yeasties are happy with the temp of the medium.
There's a huge debate about it, including something that became very contentious and was locked. I will give you MY take on it.
I use beersmith, which has a calculator for basing the amount of sugar needed to prime based on temp.. My understanding of it, is that that is TEMP AT THE TIME OF BOTTLING.
You would use less sugar the colder the beer is. I ALWAYS bottle at room temp, no matter whether the beer was cold crashed, lagered, or fermented warm. So if it's a lager, I bring it out of the cold and let it warm up for a couple of days til it's at equilibrium. Then I take a temp and run the numbers for it in beersmith.
You can bottle it right out of the chill chamber if you want, but you have to calculate the amount of sugar needed/temp of the beer at that point.
Since most of the priming sugar included in kits is premeasured at 4.5 to 5 ounces of sugar, which happens to deliver about 2-2.5 volumes of CO2 for beers at about 70 degrees...I find it way easier to figure it as close to 70 degrees as possible. Sometimes I even cheat and just measure out that amount anyway.
But often I carbed to style and and using some volume of co2 within a given range fo styles...so figuring out how much sugar I need, becomes a little more precise, and knowing the temp of the beer is more crucial.