This weekend I caught rerun of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to sneak a “café latte” into a movie theater, accidentally drops it down his pants and then sues the coffee company for making his drink too hot.
Mostly I was amused by how many times the characters said “café latte,” as it was the first time I had seen the episode since we started Barista Magazine, and I have been covering the specialty coffee world full-time. The lawsuit by Kramer is reference to the famous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit where a woman burned herself on a coffee, and eventually settled for an undisclosed sum after a judge ruled in her favor for $640,000.
But that’s all old news: here’s the kicker. In Portland this week temperatures are climbing to 100+ Fahrenheit. That’s dang hot, and fairly unusual for our town (especially the duration of this heat wave.) So people are pretty desperate to do anything to cool down.
And here’s where the two stories collide, actually not here but in a pool in the suburbs.
The driver of the truck accidentally dropped his coffee, hit the accelerator and then splashdown. And a hundred headlines bloom.
