Ayuh-- there’s a reason for that, too. Caffeol has a boiling point of around 150º. (It varies depending on the bean.) The pleasant taste of coffee is dependent on the caffeol volatilising on your tongue. If it’s so cool that it remains liquid, you can’t taste it.
It’s all about those precious oils. For an ideal cup, you want to start with a nice oily bean, properly ground (not so fine that you end up with too much fine solids in the pot.) and extracted at 190º, which gets the best fraction. The best way to preserve the oil in suspension, as you know, is in a thermos carafe. The advantage is that you’re not adding more heat to the brew, burning it, but especially that it’s air-tight – you’re not wasting the essential element of the brew by letting it boil off into the air.
Arr, now I’m all sweated up and can’t wait for my morning cup.
I’d like to put this in a different perspective. Adults do risk-benefit analyses constantly. I can, realizing that it’s not the safest idea in the world, stick a cup of coffee between my legs if I decide the risk is worthwhile in order to stick cream and sugar in it. And the risk is really quite small: perhaps minor first-degree burns, but in my experience (and I’ve spilled coffee on myself before) I’ve never suffered worse than stained pants.
The fact that the woman in question decided to risk opening a coffee between her legs doesn’t mean she’s assumed all responsibility for the endeavor. She was willing to risk minor discomfort and stained pants in order to stick stuff in her coffee, which is a reasonable risk to assume. That doesn’t mean she has no right to complain when the coffee is served unreasonably warm as McDonalds clearly did. They, with no warning, served coffee that is far hotter than is served at other establishments, served it in a manner designed for use in automobiles, and the woman made the reasonable assumption that a cup of hot coffee, served to her in a car, wouldn’t leave her with her vagina melted shut were it to spill on her.
There is no justification for serving coffee this hot, because as has been demonstrated clearly, 185 degree coffee is not drinkable. If it’s hot enough to cause third degree burns to your legs, it’s hot enough to destroy your mouth as well. Podkayne’s cite shows that in less than the time it would take to swallow 180 degree coffee, it would burn the drinker’s mouth. This is completely unreasonable; I don’t see how the woman (who might have been equally injured had she simply attempted to take a large sip of coffee - is that now unreasonable and dangerous as well?) can be held solely responsible for what happened.
Water at 180 degrees, per one of Podkayne’s cites, will cause third degree burns in 0.6 seconds and second degree ones in half that. What’s so tough to understand here? No one likes their coffee that hot. No one likes their coffee so hot it scalds their mouth when they try to drink it. Therefore it was not a reasonable serving temperature for coffee. It was not “hot coffee”-hot. It was forty or so degrees hotter than “hot coffee”.
I’m getting more and more alarmed by this widespread trend of decrying “frivolous lawsuits”. Most lawsuits, like this one, are far less clear-cut than the media portrayal suggests, and the civil court system exists for the sole purpose of evaluating the merit of such claims. The constant cries we hear for “tort reform” and other nonsense are dangerous because they remove the only legal tool the public has to ensure that corporations behave reasonably, and I’m not inclined to trust folks who don’t have to worry about any sort of accountability. If you feel the legal system is so nonfunctional as to be unable to perform its task, and that corporations are dropping like flies from it, then I’d like to see some evidence and some real proposals for alternatives. Because I think the propaganda surrounding “frivolous lawsuits” is largely a fiction and a dangerous one.
I’d like to point something out here. Anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone for any reason. It has always been this way and I don’t see what the problem is. In this case, perhaps you disagree with the results. But it’s clearly not a simple case in which someone was awarded millions of dollars (she wasn’t) for something that was due to their own negligence (only partially, as you admit.)
I don’t see the evidence that the civil court system is so dysfunctional that it can’t resolve lawsuits. That’s the implication of this whole “tort reform” thing - people are constantly being awarded enormous sums for no reason, and we need to stop it. Well, I don’t see the evidence. And if this case, which is the most-frequently cited example in my experience, is their best, then I don’t see how tort-reform proposals have any merit at all. This is the sort of complex case that obviously requires a judge and jury to decide.
Saying that something is just common sense is a very frequent excuse to avoid justifying your opinion.
No shocker here.
You’ve argued over and over that coffee ought to be brewed hot, and it’s routinely served hot, and so on. But you have no evidence that poured coffee at other establishments even approaches the temperatures in question. Coffee poured into a cup cools enormously. It comes into contact with room-temperature air, and the cup itself cools it. A glass Starbucks mug is a large, conductive, cool mass and I suspect the liquid cools at least 20 degrees, if not a lot more, during pouring. A disposable paper cup provides little insulation. So without any actual measurements of cups of coffee, you’re talking out of your ass.
No offense, but you don’t seem to have the first clue about what these numbers represent. Please don’t claim again that you routinely drink 180 degree coffee, because you don’t. You would have third degree burns on the inside of your mouth (per Podkayne’s numbers again) if you did so; the evidence is quite clear that the coffee you serve and drink in your establishment is not remotely as warm as what was served to this woman.
The brewing temperature, and the temperature after it’s made it into a caraffe and then into a cup are two very different things. Your argument about the proper brewing temperature for coffee is just completely irrelevant, because unless you stick your head under the filter basket, the liquid’s cooled a great deal before you drink it. I don’t know if you cancelled your experiment because you were busy or because the results contradicted your claims, but stop and think and you’ll realize that the coffee has had a huge chance to cool off by the time it’s served.
In the interest of accuracy, it should be pointed out that not all skin is the same. The pads of your fingers are more burn-resistent than your wrist, and your tongue and the inside of your mouth are much tougher than your naughty bits. It is possible to sip a cup of 175 or 180 degree coffee without suffering third degree burns to your tongue and trachea. We do this instinctively by taking very small amounts of liquid with a liberal inhalation of air. It takes a very short time for a small amount of hot liquid to cool on your tongue this way. It may sting a bit, but you’re not going to suffer horrific burns. If you knocked back a deep draught as though it were an ice-cold beer, on the other hand, you’d find yourself in the hospital in short order. (You’d probably have to be laid out on heroin or something in order to pull that off without reflexively ejecting it before it could do much more than burn your lips, though.)
Rather than deep-tissue burns, the main hazard of habitually drinking bevvies at extremely high temperatures is that it can damage your taste buds, leading to a long-term insensitivity to sweet or salty flavours.
(Of course, it rather goes without saying that that assumes that you manage to limit your exposure to very small volumes and the inside of your mouth. If it winds up in your lap, all bets are off.)
No work today (as of yet), so I have a little bit of time to respond to some of the many points brought up. Thanks everyone for making this such an interesting thread. Oh, wait… That’s not very pit-like of me, is it? Fuck it. I’m enjoying this.
The crux of my opinion of the case boils down to one question, it is reasonable to assume that coffee could be served at 190º F or thereabout? My answer is yes. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to expect that a cup of coffee could be quite harmful if not handled properly. Therefore, the proper precautions are necessary.
IMO, the woman did not act with reasonable proper precaution in handling the coffee that could reasonably be assumed to be at an extreme temperature. She suffered dearly for it (and, believe me, I sympathize, but I wouldn’t give her money for that, even if I handed her the coffee). But that, in no way, makes the provider liable for providing a potentially dangerous product. In the same manner that knife manufacturers aren’t responsible if you slice off your fingers. Gun manufacturers aren’t responsible if you blow your brains out. Et cetera.
Why do I believe it’s reasonable to expect coffee to be that hot? I used one analogy of pizza, which many seemed to misunderstand. First off, let’s try some reading comprehension today. I said:
At no point, did I ever say that I would expect the pizza to be 400º F. Rather, I said I would expect it to be pretty damn or fucking hot. The actual temperature is meaningless, but this translates to: hot enough to burn me, possibly severely. Reasonable precautions are to be expected. But I don’t expect the pizza maker to do anything to proactive to modify the temperature of said pizza. Just prepare it and serve it to me.
The difference with coffee, however, is I can reasonably predict the temperature, within a range, of the beverage served to me. The reason is that its main component, water, is heated to a specific temperature range in its proper preparation. That is upwards of 205º F. Unless the coffee is heated further or prepared improperly, I wouldn’t expect it to be higher than this. (And yes, I’d be dissatisfied and angry if it was, seeing as how its unnecessary and a cruel thing to do to a fine beverage.)
So, receiving a cup of coffee at 190º F is entirely possible and reasonably expected. Sure, it’s variable depending upon a variety of factors involved in its storage and delivery to me. But not unheard of. That’s why I said coffee is HOT! It’s supposed to be by the very nature of its preparation.
[Jimmy Stewart]Now see here just a minute. Nobodys saying anything about “tort reform” here.We’re just talking about an old lady, an old lady that loves her coffee, and suffered as a result[/Jimmy Stewart] Ya’ll can fill in the Stewart stutters and all yaselves.
It’s been said here quite a few times. She stuck a cup of hot coffee between her legs and got burned. In my opinion on this case and not other cases which may or may not have relevance to this discussion, she shouldn’t have been awarded anything. It’s common sense not to put a cup of hot liquid between your legs just as it’s common sense not to carry it on your head. If you do you will very likely get burned as a result. If she had put it in a cup carry or just held it in her hand with the lid on it, this whole silly thread would not be needed.
That’s it in a nutshell. If I agree that’s it’s reasonable to expect this.
I also want to just clarify why I’m defending MacDonalds. This is not because I have a great love of corporations. Neither is it because I want to condemn this woman for being a dimwit or to laugh at stupid courtcases.
It’s just that I feel these sort of cases undermine our freedom. I don’t like my coffee scalding hot actually, but I do like other things that way. Pizza might be one. Like I explained previously, many people in Ireland feel tea is another. If we are going to say that really hot things are too dangerous for adults to handle then companies will not risk serving anything hot anymore.
This is where we disagree. I believe that the act of putting a cup of hot liquid between my legs could very well damage the family jewels. (sorry no vagina on my model) Not only damage them but do exteme damage to them. :eek: This is what I believe to be reasonable.
This is where we will have to agree to disagree.
I think I came up with a good analogy. The same place I burned my feet was a bagel store. Employees sliced the bagels with knives. We went through a great deal to teach new employees how to slice bages safely. I did a fair amount myself.
We had a service that would come periodically to take our dull knives and drop off sharper knives. Now, we’re working with knives, which everyone expects to be sharp. However, if it had been a while since the knife guy came by, the knives would be a bit more dull, which leads to a different slicing style in order to halve a bagel.
Whenever we got new knives, we would put up signs reminding employees that we just got sharp ones. There’s a case where someone (an employee) could find that an object (a knife) is more dangerous than they were expecting (because it had recently been sharpened). So we reminded them of the danger.
So this is the question: was it reasonable for the woman to assume she was risking painful injuries, but not dangerous ones for the sake of convienence?
This isn’t an easy question: people have had such different life experiences, and we all tend to assume that we are the standard for “normal”. That’s why we have a jury system: so that 12 different people with different experiences can argue and bicker and do what we are doing now until they come to a consensous, because the belief is that the best answer is not in one person’s head but in that middle ground.
Do I agree with this particular answer? Yes. But I can see that there is room for disagreement–it is not cut and dry, which is why we need courts, not just law books. But the very fact that this thread exisits shows that this needed to be brought before a jury, and it seems to me that in this case the system worked–not because they came up with the “right” answer that God had hidden on His answer key, but because they came to an answer that apparently seemed reasonable to twelve people.
That was exactly my point. I was saying that companies put common sense warnings like “coffee is hot” on their products, not to genuinely warn people about the product’s danger and avoid lawsuits, but to get people to think,“Duh, coffee is supposed to be HOT, you moron! They HAVE to put stuff like this on here just because of that stupid old woman! We need tort reform to keep this country from going stupider!” I’m saying that those labels are part of a corporate ploy to play up the propaganda surrounding “frivilous lawsuits” - by implying that being undeservedly sued is such a danger that they now HAVE to remind everyone that coffee is hot every time they buy it. I’m not completely serious about this belief, but since warnings like that seem to work that way, maybe I’m right.
I’m disappointed that you were not able to complete your experiments. I’m truly interested in discovering the cooling rate of coffee.
See, I disagree with you that it’s reasonable to expect coffee in a cup to be 190[sup]o[/sup] when you drink it. That’s the temperature at which it is brewed. But even if you brew the coffee, quickly pour it into a cup/mug, and immediately take a sip, the coffee in the cup/mug has cooled considerably in that amount of time. Not enough to avoid a burn, but certainly enough to avoid a third-degree burn.
That was the reason for me trashing your pizza analogy. The pizza is prepared at 400 degrees, but the pizza itself isn’t 400 degrees. So the analogy is flawed from the get-go. In the McDonald’s case, they brewed the coffee at a certain temperature and then KEPT it at that temperature.
Yes, the woman was partially at fault. Nobody’s arguing that. The whole point is that McDonald’s was serving coffee to people that was hot enough, even after being poured into a cup and exposed to the air, to produce third-degree burns. They knew this – they had settled cases previously. They did nothing to change their procedures. THAT’S why they lost the case, and the settlement amount was so large. They knew that a product they routinely served contained an inherent danger, a danger over which they had full control. They elected not to mitigate that danger, and it cost them.
Sheesh. Did you read the thread? Or maybe you don’t understand the legal system. IANAL, but as I understand it Contributory negligence means that everyone who was negligent in some part pays for some part of the result. The jury DID find that the woman was negligent in her behavior. And they based her portion of the fault on what would have happened had a cup of coffee that a reasonable person would expect been spilled in her lap.
The lawyers then presented extensive evidence as to what a reasonable person would expect. Evidence of previous injuries, temperature coffee is served at other locations, etc. The evidence obviously showed the jury that the temperature of McDonald’s coffee was higher than reasonably expected. You can complain all you want about the “right” temperature to serve coffee (as has been done upthread), but that has no bearing on the case. What has bearing is the expected temperature. And the expected temperature of coffee in a cup is (by memory) between 150 and 160F. Coffee from home drip machines is usually 135-150F. This woman was 70 something. She has spilled coffee on herself before, and this was not what she would reasonably expect. That was McDonald’s contribution to the negligence.
To make the knife analogy attempted above better… Everyone here has cut themselves with a sharp knife. You know how much pressure it takes to cut skin and meat. It takes a lot more pressure to cut bone, more than you would ever use to cut a steak. So if I was at a restaurant and was careless with my knife and cut my finger, I would expect to get a gash, bleed a lot, and need stitches. If instead, when I cut myself using standard steak pressure, I lopped off three fingers, that would be unexpected. If it turned out the steakhouse was using ultra-sharp diamond coated blades to make their steak seem more tender, had a record of previous fnger loppings, and refused to change, the steakhouse would be partially liable for my missing fingers.
It seems to me that people have no idea how badly burned this woman was. People keeps tossing around “hot” as it if there’s a standard temp for HOT, and burned as if having your tongue burned on hot coffee is that same as receiving 3rd degree burns from HOT coffee.
They are not comparable.
Read the links. The jury was of the same mindset of many of you. THEN they saw the photos of the burns and realized that it was unreasonable to expect a cup of coffee to do such damage…even if she placed it between her legs.
If somebody were to recieve third degree burns from spilling coffee in a perfectly ordinary way (sitting down, getting bumped by someone else) then I would hope people would agree that those who served the too hot coffee would be liable.
This case is different only in that she spilled her coffee in the car in her lap, whatever. This is relevant, of course and that is why there was shared liability, McDonald’s for serving the coffee hot enough to boil flesh and the woman because of her actions.
Yup – in fact, McDonald’s had settled cases prior to this one in which people had been severely burned (as in, their flesh was literally cooked) by spilling the coffee on themselves while sitting in the restaurant.
I perfectly understand the facts of the case and I still think the award was bogus. I also agree with Maureen that McDonald’s was taking a big risk in not settling for medical bills. It made them look assholish.
Yeah, I’ve read it once or twice. :rolleyes: I’ve read it enough to know that the coffee was hotter than it should’ve been and that the old womans settlement was dropped because she put the coffee between her legs in the first place. I know about the previous settlements. I know about McDonalds poor defense. I even know about the knife analogy. I know. I know. I know.
Ya know what? Doesn’t change my mind a bit. I wouldn’t have given her a bit of cash because she put the coffee in a position where it would burn her. Yes, the coffee was hotter than it should’ve been. I got that part. I think I’ve even seen it brought up in this thread a couple of times. I think I’ve even mentioned it in a post or two.
To me, IMHO, etc etc etc, the temp of the coffee wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t put the lidless cup of hot friggin coffee between her legs. If she hadn’t needed to urgently put cream and/or sugar while she was in the car. If she had only waited until she arrived at her destination.
Listen to me (or just read me. If you can hear my voice, you may want to worry), I’m restating like a particularly verbose Mojo Jojo. :rolleyes:
I’ll put it bluntly. You can throw as many analogies at me as you want. It won’t change my mind. I think she was just as much at fault if not moreso than McDonalds.
