Instant coffee drinkers have always been the bottom dwellers of the beverage world, and we resent the encroachment of Starbucks and its new “gourmet” instant coffee.

Thanks, Mr. Howard Schultz, but we don’t need your kind here in the world of instant coffee. You’re just grubbing for money now that you’re down to your last few billion dollars because people worldwide have figured out it’s better to pay the mortgage than blow money every day on one of your $4 brews. The result of this desperation is something called “Starbucks VIA Ready Brew instant coffee, made with the highest quality 100 percent Arabica coffee.” The average person has no idea what “Arabica” coffee is, but we suspect that Osama bin Laden has a controlling interest in it. It keeps him alert as he dodges American drones in Pakistan. He laughs at the Taliban, who can only afford Folgers.

VIA is not needed in the instant coffee world, not at $1 for a single serving. Until now, instant coffee has been virtually free. It may cost $5 for an 8 ounce jar on sale at Walgreen’s, but it lasts forever, like a biblical jar of oil. A teaspoon each morning hardly makes a dent in the supply. One cup might cost a penny, about one-one-hundredth the cost of Mr. Schultz’s latest rip-off product.

Until now, instant coffee drinkers have never been bothered by pretentious people trying to impress others with their fine taste. It’s always been a cheap, quick, fix of caffeine, in which taste hardly matters. Instant coffees do have their taste differences. Folgers is the standard mellow blend; if you want something more bitter go for Chase & Sanborn; or if you want to be international about it, try Nestles Classico, with one of those accent marks I can never find on the computer keyboard.

I’ve been drinking Classico lately because it was on sale, and I like its Greek connection. I read that Greeks use Classico in an instant coffee brew called the frappe, which also has one of those annoying and hard-to-find accent marks. It’s a cold, frothy drink, which has grown to become Greece’s national beverage. This is not surprising, because before the frappe Greece’s best known drink was the hemlock tea that killed Socrates, but not before he gave the longest deathbed lecture in history. At one point the Athenian Chamber of Commerce tried to make hemlock tea the national drink, but gave it up when tourists went numb, quit spending money, and eventually died. So naturally they looked around for something better, and they discovered instant coffee in the kit bag of Mel Gibson, who left it behind when he was making a movie in nearby Gallipoli. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Instant coffee drinkers are like honest wine drinkers who swill two buck Chuck because they don’t give a hoot about its bouquet or expressiveness, they just want cheap alcohol. These alcohol purists don’t need Howard Schultz to come along with instant one hundred buck Chuck. No, you can’t sit beside us on the sidewalk, Howard, get back in your limo and leave us alone.