I can has yummy tea!

I got myself a nice toy which was delivered a few days ago: an electric kettle. My stovetop kettle takes half an hour to boil water, and doesn't whistle reliably. That makes it a bit of an ordeal to make tea or hot cocoa. The new electric is awesome. Flip down the little switch, and in five minutes I've got water at a rolling boil. Or I can turn it down if I'm making green or white tea. I can actually have tea in the morning before work now. It's a happy thing.

It also let me test a theory that certain people are stupid assholes. Y'all know the McDonald's Coffee case. As a quick reminder of my opinion on it, 3rd degree burns, skin grafts, debibement, an 8-day hospital stay, 700 previous injuries and a refusal to fix the problem due to corporate insistence that the coffee is used in a way that their own market research showed it was not: I do not call this a frivilous lawsuit. Now, the issue here is that homemade coffee is served at 140F (60C), restaurant coffee is often 150-ish F (a little over 66C), and McD's was 190F (88C).

Well, I have seen certain people insist that 140F number is BS and a normal person would consider that cold coffee, that 190F is a perfectly reasonable temperature, and tea is about that temperature when it's served because it's made with boiling water.

Now, I don't know about you, but I let my teabag sit in the water for a few minutes. You know, kind of steep? And while my cup is sitting there steeping, it does this little thing called 'cooling'. So, I decided to make an experiment. I made echinacea tea this morning, which has a 6-minute steep time. The water I poured in the cup was at a rolling boil, which means that it was 212F (100C). Now, when I took the tea bag out, it was hotter than I care to drink it, but I measured it right then, before I even put in my honey.
154.4F (68C)

I didn't measure it when it got to drinking temperature, but it was undoubtably somewhere in the 140s. So nyah. :P