During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
A lot of the world drinks a lot of espresso or at least French press, while most of what we drink in the US is drip coffee which is weaker. And when we do go for espresso drinks, a lot of us tend to favor ones that are fairly diluted (often with sugary flavored syrups and such which it’s own kind of American insanity I suppose)
Overall we do drink a lot of coffee, but it’s a bit less insane when you account for that.
Personally, and I’m not sure how this stacks up against my countrymen, but I take a 20oz (a bit less than 600ml) thermos of coffee to work with me most days and drink it throughout the morning until lunch time. Caffeine wise, that’s maybe a bit more than having 2 double shots of espresso, which doesn’t strike me as too insane, though again I’m coming from a very American perspective.
I mean, in Brazil drip/filter coffee is the most common way of drinking it and still nobody drinks in a day as much as an american drinks in a single serving. The only reasoning I can see is if american coffee is really watery and there’s barely any caffeine in there.
There’s actually a lot more caffeine than you probably think, and quite a bit more than two double espressos.
Still, two double espressos is still quite a bit, I think here in Italy the average is around 2 normal espressos in the morning, which would be equal to one double. Four to five espressos in a day is considered the limit to what you should drink, more than that it’s a bit much.
Also all the sugar and syrups you pour in can’t be healthy.
I think drip is stronger, per bean if you know what I mean.
Finland is similar to US in that we have high coffee consumption and we like our drip coffee. I usually have two to three mugs (400 – 600 ml) of coffee throughout the day but I would imagine others might drink more than that. I don’t need that much in the morning. One time I had so good cortado (not sure if it was single or double shot) at a café that I had to order another one.