It is widely believed that the universe underwent a phase of accelerated expansion known as cosmic inflation. Most models stipulate that the infant cosmos was cold and empty during this epoch, requiring an unknown process afterwards to generate the hot plasma seen in observations. Warm Inflation is an alternative scenario in which the cosmos was instead immersed in a hot bath of elementary particles already during inflation. We show that the strong nuclear force can provide the heating mechanism needed to sustain that plasma. This opens up a unique opportunity to probe the mechanism that set the initial conditions for the Hot Big Bang by combining upcoming CMB observations with axion search experiments in the laboratory.