Starbucks is releasing, or has already released, a new instant coffee called VIA. They offered a free packet of it to anyone who wanted, so I gave them my address and a couple weeks later a cute little mailer arrived with two single serve packets, one columbian and one italian roast.
As you can see from the first image, we're Lavazza people ourselves. We buy it by the case. So we weren't holding out any great hope for this stuff. Given that we don't like Starbucks' regular coffee, an instant didn't seem to have much hope.
The first night it was just Sasha and I. We heated the water in a tea kettle, and poured out the first sachet into a measuring cup (in order to be precise about the water/coffee ratio - I figured it was better to give them the benefit of the doubt). As others have noted, the grains are really tiny - it's almost a coffee powder. They smelled... like coffee, really. Nothing special, but not like chemically badness.
We brewed it up, tried it straight, tried it with milk, and decided... not bad! It actually seemed to have a little bit of that burnt starbucks' taste (I think the Italian Roast more than the Columbian). There was a little coffee aroma to go with it, nothing amazing but workable.
I work in an office where Folgers or somesuch mass market coffee is brewed. This was definitely as good or better than those.
The next night we had a dinner guest, who also agreed to be a guinea pig as we brewed the second sachet. The results were pretty much identical. Everyone agreed it was a perfectly drinkable cup of coffee.
My understanding is that this will sell for around a dollar per cup. I'm thinking that's a bit high, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did well with it - at the very least, the drink is not an affront to your taste buds. Happily for me, another case of Lavazza arrived while I was working on this, so I'll be fine with my brewed coffee, thanks all the same!