The espresso martini won't go away. Here's how to make a good one. |

Last summer, when I wrote about the Dirty Shirley and the bizarre amount of coverage it was getting for a drink that hardly any cocktail aficionados seemed to actually be drinking, the cocktail that kept surfacing as a true contender for “drink of the summer” was the espresso martini. I’d call up cocktail bars and ask some variation of, “Hey, have y’all noticed any uptick in people ordering this clown-car TikTok drink called the Dirty Shirley?” and they’d say absolutely not, but they would often mention that they’d been running out of coffee beans or needing new coffee equipment because of all the orders for espresso martinis.

The espresso martini is still everywhere. I wondered if it was a new high (maybe the peak before the plunge?) when a friend texted me a picture from an outdoor concert venue of a banner over a concession booth advertising espresso martinis. For once, I was relieved to see a pre-bottled mixer: A venue sadistic enough to ask employees to pull fresh espresso shots and serve bespoke cocktails to hordes of Monsters of Rock fans would be inviting riots.

Get the recipe: Espresso Martini a.k.a. Vodka Espresso

But a concert venue is the perfect place to sell espresso martinis, even if it’s not the perfect place to make them right. Concertgoers want to relax and stay awake, and the espresso martini has long been known as a sort of Red Bull and vodka for people with taste buds.

I was tempted to try to write the first espresso martini article ever not to reference its origin story: How in the 1980s, London bartender Dick Bradsell created it on the spot when a now-famous model (long reported, though not by Bradsell himself, to have been either Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell) came in and said, “Can you make me a drink that will wake me up and then [mess] me up?”

But how can you not include that story? Loose as some of the details remain, it’s just too good, both as an efficient summation of the drink’s lasting appeal and as a perfect cocktail myth: debauched young celebrities behaving debauchedly; a drink order both highly quotable and unprintable; a bartender creating a now-iconic cocktail on the spot for his momentary muse.

It invites the drinker, decades later, to feel celebrity-and-era adjacent. Can’t you just picture it? The famous face and form, sashaying into Bradsell’s London bar in the wee hours with her entourage, exhausted from jet lag and too many runway-turns in Dolce & Gabbana, but needing to stay awake because they’re meeting up with the Fine Young Cannibals at the Wag Club at 4 a.m.?

I mean really — who among us hasn’t been there?

Sadly, we can’t fact-check with Bradsell, who died in 2016, and whose telling of the story when he was alive tended to vary the details. But it’s still one of the more reliable tales in the corpulent body of sketchy cocktail lore, beating the Negroni Sbagliato, the daiquiri and the famous Dorothy Parker poem about martinis (“after three I’m under the table/after four, I’m under my host”) that almost certainly wasn’t written by Dorothy Parker.

What we can be fully clear on is that — with its ingredients of espresso, coffee liqueur, vodka and simple syrup — the espresso martini is not a true martini at all, and in fact many refer to it as a Vodka Espresso. Bradsell himself, who apparently tinkered with the drink’s recipe for years, later renamed it the Pharmaceutical Stimulant.

But it’s most well-known as the Espresso Martini, and it’s truly a world traveler. Last summer, I asked writer Robert Simonson — who wrote “A Proper Drink,” a book about the cocktail renaissance that delved into Bradsell’s bartending legacy, and who’s done several explorations of the drink — what might be behind the drink’s second life.

Share this articleShare

He speculated that some of the espresso martini’s domestic resurgence might have to do with the launch of Mr. Black, an Australian coffee liqueur that hit the United States in 2018 and was widely promoted as an upgrade of that component in the drink. As a bit of stealth marketing, he said, brand reps sometimes will go to bars and order a round of drinks made with the brand. “And you know what the espresso martini looks like — as soon as you see one, everyone orders one,” Simonson said. “It’s one of those drinks.”

Get the recipe: Vodka Espresso Arancia

Although it’s gone up and down in the United States, the drink has held steady as one of the most popular cocktails in Australia for years. “The coffee culture is very strong in Melbourne and probably plays a part in its popularity amongst imbibers,” Oisín Conneely, general manager at the Black Pearl in Melbourne, told me in an email. The bar, which has been open for more than two decades, has had different approaches to the drink — which is still one of its top-selling classics. Currently, “our Espresso Martini is a simple classic shaken one using a bit of Averna amaro and a pinch of salt for a bit more depth and flavour and grated coffee bean on top for aroma.”

Using amaro to add bittersweet complexity is a common upgrade. It’s a good one, especially when the amaro is coffee-based (both Mr. Black and J. Rieger & Co. make lovely coffee amari — try them in the Vodka Espresso Aranciata). But there are many ways to play with the spec. Even bars that don’t list the drink are often doing a riff (or a rebuttal!) under a different name. The neutrality of the vodka base and the variety of flavors that complement coffee let you lean into the drink’s after-dinner potential, taking it into dessert terrain, or make it more of an aperitivo by tilting toward its bitter coffee notes. Locally, I’ve been downing both standard versions and baroque riffs: Service Bar’s version brings in chocolate, coconut, and Don Ciccio’s coffee and barley liqueur. L’Annexe spices up its version with cinnamon and chili in a drink named Enough Already.

It was making the drink at home, though, that persuaded me I’ve been underrating the espresso martini. My coffee-aficionado husband helped by pulling espresso shots, and making the drink with the real stuff suggested that the reason I hadn’t fully appreciated it in the past is because I’d gotten versions made with coffee in a weaker form.

Let me confirm: You won’t achieve the taste or visual appeal of the classic espresso martini without real espresso. Side by side, the difference was glaringly obvious. The closest I was able to get without it was using cold brew concentrate, but even that required adjustments: The drink was thinner and didn’t acquire the rich foam surface that allows for the traditional garnish of three coffee beans. I won’t say the drink is bad without espresso, but it’s more likely to need embellishments. Procuring real espresso is worth the effort.

It’s also worth sounding a note of caution about this potent mixture of alcohol and caffeine. I’ll offer a modest revision of the famed not-Dorothy-Parker poem:

I like an espresso martini

One at the very most

After two I’m tipsy and hypervigilant

After three I’m awake trembling at 4 a.m., praying for the sweet relief of death

It’s not a very good poem. But to be fair, I haven’t slept in days.

Get the recipe: Vodka Martini a.k.a. Vodka Espresso

Get the recipe: Vodka Espresso Arancia

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLOwu8NoaWlqY2R9d3uQbmaeq6CnsrS%2FzmakmqqknruqedGemqKolWQ%3D

The espresso martini won't go away. Here's how to make a good one.

CATALOG

FEATURED TAGS