February 2009

The coffee drinking world has received Starbucks' news of a new product launch with, let us say, "some skepticism." Howard Schultz is promising to reinvent the way we drink coffee on the go, by providing us with handy single serving packets of instant soluble coffee. In the minds of many people, instant soluble coffee is freighted with two associations: 1. Old people 2. Tastes awful When I hear the phrase "instant coffee" I think of my grandmother. Not because she drank instant coffee - she was a coffee fanatic, and would never stoop to such lows. But because she kept a jar of petrified Sanka in the back of her cupboard for emergencies, and for elderly visitors who preferred the taste of Sanka to a pot of freshly brewed coffee. Her own mother, who had been born at the turn of the century, greatly preferred the taste of Sanka. Apparently she had developed a taste for it during the rationing of the Great Depression.