Summary
A California jury awarded Michael Garcia $50 million after he suffered severe burns from a spilled Starbucks hot tea, requiring skin grafts and causing permanent disfigurement.
Garcia’s lawsuit alleged a Starbucks employee failed to secure the drink in a tray, leading to the spill. Starbucks offered a $30 million settlement with confidentiality, which Garcia rejected.
The company plans to appeal, calling the damages excessive.
The case echoes past lawsuits over hot beverage burns, including the famous McDonald’s coffee case from the 1990s.
Black tea needs to be brewed pretty close to boiling, and even green tea is brewed at 185, the same temp as the McDonald’s coffee incident. I don’t know how you can brew tea to order and hand it to someone a moment later without it still being at almost the exact same temperature. Tea also needs 3-5 minutes to steep, and you can’t hold up a drive through just to hand it over.
I’m not much for Starbucks, so don’t take this as me defending them, but I think most honest people would have trouble articulating why this merits a $50mm lawsuit. Imagine a similar ruling coming down on your local cafe.
A reminder that for the McDonald’s claim, she only wanted her medical bills covered, it was McDonald’s that refused a much smaller claim of some tens of thousands and instead insisted on taking it to court. Plus they had been advised numerous times previously from customers about burns due to their decision to maintain the temp of their brewed coffee so high for so long after it was made, solely to minimize profit loss. They were scraping pennies and ignoring customer warnings.
Starbucks offered the guy $30M with a confidentiality agreement. They were already clearly thinking it warranted an amount in that region, which would only be if they thought they could be liable for even more.
Not just all of that, but her injuries were grotesquely horrific, including permanent damage to her genitalia. For those claiming these are ridiculous awards, ask yourself what it would cost to make you accept having your genitals melted by hot liquids.
How much I gotta pay?
What the f- oh, American units
I was wondering what the heck kind of green tea needed that kind of treatment, lol
You can’t physically get water to go over 100c in atmosphere without it being pressurized. What impossible feats where you thinking was going on when you saw the 185?
This is just straight up false. I regularly brew black and herbal teas at 70-75°C (158-167°F) if I’m in a rush. It steeps long before cooling to a drinkable temperature. I haven’t tried brewing green tea this way but I doubt it’s much different.
Sun tea is brewed barely above ambient temperature (although that of course takes hours to steep).
It’s not “straight up false”. You’re literally brewing your tee under the accepted norm. Most anyone who makes black tee knows the correct brewing temperature is around 205f. There’s so many sources that it should be brewed over 195f there isn’t even a valid argument you could try to make against this. Same temps for herbal teas.
White, yellow, and green teas get lower temps. Not black or herbal. Heck, just Google search “black leaf tea brewing temperature”. I doubt you’ll be able to find a single real source that states under 195f
Physics doesn’t care about “accepted norms”. Tea can steep well under boiling. Yes, even black tea. There are countless recipes online for sun tea that specify that the tea be steeped at ambient temperature. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a location where that gets far above 50°C.
So no, tea, even black tea, does not require near-100°C water.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying an unconventional recipe for tea, but this is not what most people around the world are looking for when ordering tea. I guess suggesting that fast food places switch to lower brewing temperatures and different recipes to avoid this issue is interesting if that’s what you’re suggesting. The taste would be different though.
It doesn’t require such hot water per se, but you get a lot more flavor in a shorter period of time when brewing hot tea or coffee. You see this with cold brew coffee recipes taking hours to brew and still producing different flavors from iced coffee. (Coffee brewed hot, then cooled.) I searched up some recipes for sun tea, and they also take hours to brew. That doesn’t work for a fast food restaurant trying to make tea on demand. If you lower the temperature to even 85 C for black tea you will be able to taste a difference.
Confident stupid people are why trump is in office.
I get if you are doing something different personally, but its literally the recommendation on the box. When I was learning about coffee I found that water into the brew basket or pour over at 185 would produce a terrible sour flavor, and that is well known in specialty coffee. Tea seems to be more forgiving, but I still let my water hit a boil before I brew mine. First result on google for a tea shop states the same thing: https://artfultea.com/blogs/101/tea-brewing-temperature-guide
I’m all for ganging up on mega-corps and watching them squirm when a lawsuit comes around, but it may have been a bit extreme to call my statement false. If Starbucks did anything wrong here, to me it was the cup not being seated in the carrier, not the water temperature.
Also, what stops drive-thrus from serving the kind of tea that you can brew at slightly cooler temp?
A fair question. Black tea is the most prevalent type of tea across the world. Recently after seeing a news story about Indian Kulhads (single use ceramic cups) I did some searching about what teas different regions drink, and most regions seem to drink regular black tea with some preferring black tea with spices. I don’t think the masses would accept 145° oolong at twice the price for the sole reason of lowering their risk of scalding burns.
It’s up to the business to decide how and what they serve safely. If hot tea cannot be served safely, don’t serve it. Or maybe invest that goddamn extra cent into a cup that does not spill.
I called the statement false, because it is. If it were true, sun tea would not be possible. Tea brewed at progressively lower temperatures has longer steeping time, but tea can indeed be brewed much lower than boiling point. I encourage you to test this yourself if you don’t believe me.
Also, I emphasize again: I literally brew tea at 70°C all the time. So no, tea does not need to be brewed at 100°C.