There’s something more than a little daggy about the king of caffeinated cocktails – but it’s doing a roaring trade in Melbourne

When the coffee liqueur brand Mr Black opened sales for the world’s first festival dedicated exclusively to the espresso martini, tickets sold out mere hours. It then added another day to the Melbourne festival – tickets for which sold out in seven minutes. It then added a third and final day – which again sold out.

Clearly Australian drinkers, particularly Melburnians, are in the depths of a torrid love affair with the espresso martini.

There are very few bars in Melbourne that can’t or won’t shake up an espresso martini. Bartender James Armstrong puts it succinctly: “Melbourne loves coffee, Melbourne loves booze. It’s literally the most Melbourne drink since a Melbourne Bitter.”

Despite this, the espresso martini is not at all a Melbourne invention – it was in fact invented in London during the 80s by the late, legendary bartender Dick Bradsell.

The story goes that a famous model – Bradsell, the embodiment of old-school hospitable discretion, never said who – strode into his bar and asked for a drink that would first “wake me up, then fuck me up”. Bradsell obliged by whipping together the spirit du jour, vodka, some coffee liqueur, some simple syrup, and a shot of freshly pulled espresso.

Bradsell christened the drink the “vodka espresso” but it wasn’t long before it was given the name “espresso martini”.

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Once in Australia – the Melbourne bartender Fred Siggins suggests that it arrived via UK bartenders on working holiday visas – the espresso martini found a spiritual home in coffee-loving Melbourne. The bartenders I speak to about its popularity identify several reasons why it took off here. For David Ferris, it’s the perfect common denominator: “They can fit in any setting: from fancy 40th-floor CBD cocktail bars to grimy rave clubs … If you have a group of five or more, you can’t get them all to agree on a bitter Italian cocktail or something tequila-based – this drink works because it appeals to a really wide range of people.”

“The stimulant effect certainly plays a part,” says a bar manager, Graham Espie, “coupled with Melburnians’ entrenched sensibility to appreciate the bean in every available form.”

Venue managers seem to love the drink as much, if not more, than the customers who order it. “It’s cheap as chips,” Espie says. “It can cost the venue as little as three dollars, and is sold in some places for over $20.” (Espie adds that at his venue, Howler, “We keep ours at a reasonable price and use good vodka.”)

While some of that mark-up is dedicated to labour costs, there is still some serious coin to be made from them – especially when compared with other drinks.

“I can only sell a vodka Red Bull for $12, when it probably cost me around two dollars and 80 cents to put up,” says Clara Edmonds, “but I can sell an espresso martini for $20.”

The numbers involved are sometimes staggering: Espie estimates that Howler sells 10 times as many espresso martinis as any other cocktail, while Edmonds calculates that at one venue she worked at, more than 50% of the drinks she’d ever made were espresso martinis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Mixologists yearn to remain at the cutting edge. If they feel that things are becoming mainstream, they don’t want to be associated with it,’ says bar manager Graham Espie. Photograph: Maksym Kammerer/Getty Images/iStockphoto

It seems that the only people who don’t always feel the love for the drink are bartenders themselves. At a party filled with hospitality workers, I mention I am working on an article about espresso martinis.

“Don’t talk to me about fucking espresso martinis!,” one bartender spits. She has, it turns out, recently worked a shift where a hen’s party came in bearing little signs on sticks printed with the words “espresso martini”, so they wouldn’t have to bother talking to their bartender.

Another contacts me when she finds out about this article with an impressively vitriolic rant: “Every arsehole who’s never ordered anything other than Melbourne Bitter and the occasional rum and ginger orders 50 of them at a time under the delusion that it will make them appear to have some kind of class and half an idea about cocktails … I’ve only met one or two bartenders that don’t sigh or roll their eyes or contemplate suicide every time the words ‘six expresso martinis thanks, mate’ flop out of some drunkard’s mouth.”

Espie argues that familiarity breeds contempt: “Mixologists yearn to remain at the cutting edge. If they feel that things are becoming mainstream, they don’t want to be associated with it.”

It’s true that, at least to the cocktail cognoscenti, there’s something more than a little daggy about the espresso martini. The name itself is a remnant of the benighted cocktail culture of the 90s, when nearly everything served up in a v-shaped glass was a “-tini” of some sort: apple martini, French martini, flirtini. (Bradsell tried, after the drink had been rechristened as the espresso martini, to rename it the “pharmaceutical stimulant” but it never stuck.)

And, as Edmonds notes, it commits another cocktail crime: continuing the somewhat disreputable Prohibition-era trick of disguising the taste of liquor with strong, sweet flavours: “The espresso martini’s flavour masks the booze – you can use, excuse my French, shit vodka in an espresso martini and still make it taste good. Particularly in Melbourne, because we have such good coffee.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An espresso martini at Pascale’s, at QT Melbourne. Photograph: Jason Loucas

The flexibility of the cocktail has encouraged experimentation to keep it on-trend, with some Melbourne bars taking it beyond Bradsell’s original four-ingredient recipe.

The easiest tweak is a more flavoursome spirit base than the original vodka, such as rum or tequila. More high-end bars use pretty recherché techniques to tart up the drink. Bartender Dominique Cacioli, for instance, developed a version that pairs a chilled base – Illy espresso liqueur, Chambord, and Woodford Reserve bourbon, blended together and barrel-aged – with a hot foam flavour, and bitter white chocolate floating on top. Eau-de-Vie Melbourne’s house espresso martini variation similarly comes topped with a liquid nitrogen–chilled sabayon.

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For professionals in the coffee industry, the espresso martini’s popularity is something of a double-edged sword. Elika Rowell, co-owner of Melbourne coffee roastery Square One, thinks it’s time to reconsider: “Chilling espresso over ice shocks it into severe bitterness – a totally undesirable trait in coffee. Yes, you can add simple syrup to it to try to put a veil over that bitterness, but it will always taste muddy or dirty. Why does everyone want to use a product that actually doesn’t taste good unless you add sugar to it?”

Her suggestion? Bars should talk to their coffee suppliers first. “There are so many awesome coffees around that all taste totally different ... Picking a coffee to suit what you’re doing could be really challenging, but also super-interesting.”

According to bartender Clara Edmonds, any drink that wants to take over as the king of caffeinated cocktails would have to jump more than a few hurdles. “Please, any bartender out there, give me a better option. One that is accessible to everyone, enjoyable for everyone, price-pointed for every owner, easy to make, one that every bartender knows how to make.”

If a drink nails all of those key components, Edmonds says, “it will probably take off. But until that better drink comes along, I think the espresso martini will still be Melbourne’s cocktail.”



• The Festival of the Espresso Martini runs until 6 November at the Meat Market, North Melbourne