Think of the new Via product as "instant 2.0"

It’s been decades since coffee has received an upgrade. Sure, there has been a steady beat of packaging improvements. All those cute, colorful foil pods that get popped into machines that then spit out a variety of brews. But according to coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, not since coffee giants General Foods (now part of Kraft (KFT) )and Nestle (NSRGY) spent millions in the late 1960s figuring out how to freeze-dry our morning addiction, has the actual coffee been the subject of a technological push forward.

Let’s face it, that has been a good thing. No offense to all you Taster’s Choice die-hards, but trying to improve upon a well-roasted coffee bean, ground to perfection and then brewed to your personal taste (I’ll take a double espresso with a little bit of foam) has mostly been a big mistake. We have all benefited from coffee’s return to its low-tech origins. But now the company that arguably has benefited the most from the artisan approach to coffee, Starbucks (SBUX), is taking us back to the future with its new line of instant coffee dubbed Via.

You no doubt already heard this was coming. The rollout of Via started in Starbucks’ home turf Seattle, and in recent months has been expanding to places like New York and London (both tremendous cities with on-average tremendously bad coffee). This week it went nationwide. So early-adopters, now is your chance.

In making its bid for a chunk of the $20 billion worldwide instant coffee market, much of that is the United Kingdom and Japan where instant is the de-facto coffee mode, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schulz says his company spent 20 years perfecting a top-secret technology that ultimately results in a cup of coffee made with Via, that is indistinguishable from Starbuck’s typical brewed coffee.

So, of course we want to know what this patent-pending process is all about.  I called Andrew Linnemann, director of green coffee quality and operations at Starbucks. He’s the guy who makes sure all the beans are up to snuff before they get roasted. For the last two years he’s been focused on making sure Via lived up to the Starbucks’ reputation (this the perfect spot for all you Starbucks haters to draft your inevitable rude comments).

Via is a combination of dried coffee and “micro-ground” coffee. According to Linnemann the dried part follows what is recognizable as industry procedure. Starbucks takes its beans and makes a liquid coffee extract, which gets reduced to dried form. But whereas your typical instant coffee maker is focused on yield and output, the Starbucks gang focused on taste, Linnemann says. Start with better beans, brew the coffee, and then break the coffee drying process down into smaller sub-steps to preserve the flavor. All with no chemicals. “We use the same equipment as the other guys, but how we use the equipment is much different,” Linnemann says. What that likely means is that the yield in the Starbucks process is much lower (the extraction level is lower). That is by far a more expensive way to go but one that preserves more of the flavor. It may also explain why Starbucks is charging around $1 per packet of the stuff.

So far so good. “But it is the micro-grinding technology where we really cracked the code,” Linnemann says. Aha! Now we are getting to the real “bean” of the matter. “The key is how do you grind freshly roasted coffee fine enough to preserve its character, add flavor and texture without adding grit?” Linnemann says. And how does Starbucks do it? “I can’t tell you that,” Mr. Green Bean says laughing. He did say, “it’s as if the coffee bean went to a spa.” Which means exactly what?

So Starbucks is serious about keeping this micro-grinding technology a secret, at least for another 18 months or so and the patent is made public. Clair Hicks, a professor of food science at the University of Kentucky, figures what Starbucks does is a lot like grinding pepper. “You can seen how it would release more of the flavor components, and could improve the taste,” Hicks says. ‘My first bet is that they take the extract and the micro-grounds and run the whole thing through a freeze-drier.”

Whatever the ultimate secret technology is revealed to be, you can taste the results at your neighborhood Starbucks. Samples of Via are being offered  in a free side-by-side taste test with brewed Starbucks coffee through Monday. Free coffee? Now that is an upgrade I can get behind.

Watch me and fellow Fortune writer John Fortt taste the new Starbucks Via on Techmate:

Here's one thing the folks at Apple could teach their friends at AT&T: how to parcel out the good news.

Case in point: the Starbucks-iPhone-Wi-Fi deal that's been on and off all week and generating all the wrong kind of headlines (see for example, here).

If Steve Jobs were running AT&T, he would have kept it simple. And a surprise. The first we would have heard about it would be when he announced it, with a flourish, as a fait accompli. Starting today, free unlimited Wi-Fi for every iPhone owner at all 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops and every other AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot — 17,000 in the U.S., 70,000 around the world.

Boom.

What we got instead was the public relations equivalent of second-day coffee, starting with the press release AT&T (T) issued back in February. The 13-paragraph document talks about free Wi-Fi for "AT&T broadband, AT&T U-verse^SM Internet [and] AT&T's remote access services business customers" but never mentions Apple (AAPL) or the iPhone — two hot-button words that would have given the news some real buzz.

Instead reporters focused on the fact that Starbucks (SBUX) was pulling the plug on T-Mobile, which had been providing it with wireless service since 2001.

Then, last week, without warning, AT&T turned the service on. I spotted it on April 30 when I tried to log on to my T-Mobile account and discovered an AT&T link that wasn't there the day before. I was already thinking about how many extra shots of espresso I could buy with the $39 a month I would save.

And I was not alone. Apple rumor sites that day were flooded with tips from both coasts alerting them that iPhone owners were getting free Wi-Fi at Starbucks by just by typing in their 10-digit AT&T phone number. AT&T had apparently launched a nationwide test without telling anyone.

Then, four days later, the service stopped, as abruptly and mysteriously as it started, setting off waves of confusion and speculation about what the company's on-again, off-again behavior might mean. (see here)

You might think that AT&T would have learned their lesson. But no. On Thursday, the text on its website was changed to add language about the new service — "access to AT&T's more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks* all for use (sic) in the U.S." — that iPhone owners took as a signal that the game was on for good.

Then the language disappeared, along with the Wi-Fi service, triggering another round of second-guessing. (see here)

Apparently the habit of firing before aiming — not to mention clearing it with publicity — had spread from AT&T's networking guys to its marketing staff.

Officially, both AT&T and Apple have no comment, but the folks in Cupertino are clearly miffed. They saw the Starbucks deal as big news for iPhone owners, and they had hoped to work with AT&T to package it for high-profile release, probably in a matter of weeks.

They would have done it right.