[travisp]

>Starbucks coffee is not served anywhere near that hot.

True, it's usually not, although it's considered a "hack" to get better coffee to ask for hotter coffee from Starbucks (so that your drink stays warm in the cold and when you are taking your coffee with you): http://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-drink-extra-hot-201...

The National Coffee Association recommends brewing between 195 and 205 and holding around 180 to 185 if not serving immediately (which it recommends). Source: http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71

Many people who brew coffee at home have coffee that can be as hot as 205F. Fancy fresh pour over coffee from a nice coffeehouse will have just been brewed with water around that temperature.

And it also raises the interesting question of what these places are supposed to do about tea: if they serve you hot water and a tea bag, the water served should be close to boiling if it's herbal or black tea to get a proper extraction.

Either way, it's not quite so simple as "McDonalds was careless".

[vidarh]

> Either way, it's not quite so simple as "McDonalds was careless".

No, it's far worse than McDonalds being careless: They knew that their practice was dangerous, and regularly resulted in medical treatments, yet did not change their procedures.

[Dylan16807]

Unless they serve the coffee at a completely unrealistic temperature, someone out of millions will be regularly injured. So how many people are still injured at 160 degrees?

The fact that someone gets hurt does not prove that there was negligence. Compare how many people get into car accidents on the way to McDonalds.

[colomon]

Tea really is the perfect counterexample, isn't it? If you try to serve me water for tea at a "safe" 160F, I'm never going to buy tea from you again.

[aaronem]

Have you ever had McDonalds coffee? It's not as though we're talking about the stuff you get after it's been through a civet cat's digestive system, where it's scarce and expensive and you really want to extract it at the recommended 200 degrees Fahrenheit to get every last molecule you can of the volatiles out of the beans, so that you aren't wasting your investment.

McDonalds coffee, conversely, is just plain old shit. It's the worst coffee I've ever had, and that is saying quite a lot. If you've ever tasted it, you know that they could brew it at 200, 180, or 140, and it's still going to taste just as godawful. There is absolutely no reason they need to be passing it out the drive-through window at temperatures high enough to peel skin and poach flesh if the half-awake minimum-wage worker who poured it didn't pop the lid on quite right -- or if, while taking the cup and getting it settled into the console, you fail to pay the sort of attention commensurate to a potentially life-threatening process which you probably didn't realize was potentially life-threatening.

[unreal37]

All the hyperbole is not really adding to the conversation.

[pekk]

The underlying point that this really isn't about gourmet extraction of flavor is relevant, however. If Starbucks can serve lower-temperature coffee, McDonald's can, its coffee is not even as good as Starbucks'.