(1) You may have coffee or tea.
When, in fact, tea is forbidden. The sentence is true. Question: how can we derive via Gricean reasoning that you implicated that I may have tea?
Answer: we generate some alternatives to (1). Among them is the shorter, true
(2) You may have coffee.
Since (2) is shorter and obviously salient, why didn't I say it?
A way of capturing the thought is to argue that each disjunct must "be doing some work." Since (1) contains one more disjunct than (2), it must be doing some work. What is the nature of this work? My goal, if I am opposed to the Gricean analysis, is to give a plausible account of what this work consists in, without assigning it the role of choice.
That doesn't seem too hard, actually. It could simply be ignorance of what is permitted that causes me to cast my net wide over the disjunctions. So I'm not sure we've got a direct route from textbook semantics to the derivation of choice as an implicature. (Unless we do crazy things that amount to assuming I'm deontically omniscient.)
I think, though, that the following is a bad argument: "I want to say that each of coffee and tea is permissible, so I put them both in!" That begs the question, since it assumes that sentence of the form "you may A or B or...Z" gives one a list of options all of which are permissible. But that's just what we were trying to prove.
Maybe the following twist is a bit better?: Suppose you wanted to say that the following things, A, B...Z were permissible. (This seems like a not uncommon situation to find oneself in.*) How would you do it? Well, there's a good reason for not putting each of A-Z in it's own sentence "You may...," since that would be very longwinded. There's also a good reason for not saying, "You may A and B and ...Z" since that implies that you can do all of them (at once?) and they may be mutually exclusive. That leaves "or."
*A pipe-dream: a semantics for choice that can really be described as a "logic of agency."
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