Penny Cox took a slow, purposeful whiff of each of the two steaming coffees in front of her, followed by a tentative sip, and yet another sniff.

Years of research and the weight of the mighty Starbucks Incorporated rested on this moment.

The ubiquitous coffee shop’s fortunes have been flagging in recession-ravaged America and it has turned for salvation to the humble, put-upon instant coffee. Long-regarded as an anathema to the connoisseur, Starbucks claims to have finally cracked the age old problem of how to make an instant coffee taste like its posher cousin.

The Times put Starbucks’ new coffee to the test, asking punters to compare a humble cup of instant coffee to Starbucks’ rather more ambitious “microground” Via Ready Brew.

Around Ms Cox, a 56-year-old factory mechanic from Milton Keynes, the cafe fell silent. “This is the real Starbucks coffee”, she declared, pointing to a cup of run-of-the-mill coffee.

The coffee will be introduced to Starbucks cafes in Britain next month - for at-home consumption - after which the company hopes supermarkets will stock it for £1.20 for a pack of three or £3.95 for 12.

Coffee drinkers asked by The Times said they would be reluctant to pay 40p for a one-cup sachet of Starbucks instant - around ten times as expensive as a cup of its rivals.

“They both taste watery - I never buy instant coffee and I wouldn’t buy either of those at any price”, said Kirsty Keown, an unimpressed teacher.

Starbucks estimates that 80 per cent of British households have instant coffee, comprising an £800 million market. Darcy Willson-Rymer, the manager of Starbucks in Britain, said the coffee would be situated at the “premium, or even super-premium” end of the market. But he insisted that it made sense to launch the product in a recession.

“We’re competing with instant coffee, but we’re comparing it to ground coffee”, he said.

“This has been in development for a long time, but this is a great time to be launching it because people do have value in mind.”

The development of the concept began 18 years ago when a customer froze Starbucks beans to take on a camping trip. The proud inventor took his home-made instant coffee to the original Starbucks store on Pike Place, Seattle, and was invited for a meeting with Howard Schultz, the chain’s founder.

The inventor, Don Valencia, was made Starbucks head of research. But the breakthrough only came 18 months ago.

Anthony Carroll, a Starbucks coffee-taster brought across to London for the no-holes-barred launch, remembers the moment. He said: “We all just looked at each other in amazement the quality room, saying this is even better than we imagined.”

While it seems that somebody forgot to tell a handful of the customers at The Times’s local Starbucks, there is little chance that its staff - or “partners” as they are known- remain in the dark.

A Ready Brew “Learning Card” issued to staff instructs them to call the product “soluble coffee” rather than instant. “Using ‘soluble’ instead of ‘instant’ helps reinforce the point that Starbucks Via Ready Brew has raised the bar and is a whole new product.”

At the product’s launch in the US, “coffee education partners” enthused over the prospect of enjoying “the Starbucks experience any time you like”. It remains to be seen whether the British public are ready to be educated, but the stakes are high in the US.

Starbucks said last month that it would cut 6,700 of its 167,000 staff and shut about 1,000 under-performing outlets, as its after-tax profits for the three months to the end of December fell 69 per cent.

But at least one coffee connoisseur in London was a fan of Starbucks’ innovation. Andre Shadid pushed away the first mug of coffee offered to him at the first whiff of cheap instant coffee.

“I’d definitely pay more for the other one. The price isn’t an issue”, he said. Somewhere in Seattle, some highly paid executives are desperately hoping there are more like him.

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