Behind the history of Espresso Martinis

“Wake me up, then f*** me up”

Ask ten people who invented the Espresso Martini and you'll get ten different answers, a couple of made-up ones, and at least one person swearing they know where to get the best one ever. But here's what actually happened.

The story starts in London, early 1980s, with a bartender named Dick Bradsell. At Soho Brasserie, a customer walked up and asked for something that would "wake me up, and then f*** me up." An unbothered Bradsell then grabbed the vodka, pulled a fresh shot of espresso, added a little sugar syrup, shook it hard and poured it over ice. He called it the Vodka Espresso. No signs of coffee liqueur back then, nor a martini glass. Just the perfect mix of caffeine and booze to do exactly what was asked of them.

A few years later at Fred's Club, Bradsell revisited the drink — added coffee liqueur (Kahlúa, originally), swapped the rocks glass for a coupe, and the Espresso Martini as we mostly know it today was born. 

The original recipe, just for the record

Rumour has it that an Espresso Martini is the most hated order among bartenders, but in practice, the whole thing is quite simple to put together if you have everything at hand. 60ml vodka, 30ml fresh espresso, 15ml coffee liqueur, 7.5ml sugar syrup is the OG recipe. You want to shake hard to get that thick, tan foam on top — and then strain and garnish with three beans. That's it.

The golden days of Espresso Martinis

The Espresso Martini had its moment through the '90s and early 2000s, then, like a lot of things from that era, quietly fell out of fashion. It spent a good chunk of the 2010s being the drink your auntie ordered, to be honest.

Then it came back. Hard. Somewhere in the last few years the Espresso Martini went from slightly dated to one of the best-selling cocktails in the world, showing up on menus, in cans, in group chats, and all over social media at 11pm on a Friday. Turns out "a drink that wakes you up and messes you up" was always going to be a great concept.

Why (and how) we made it our own

We looked at that resurgence and, honestly, weren't that impressed by most of what was on offer in terms of coffee. Forty years of the same commodity-grade quality and run-of-the-mill coffee liqueur were dressed up and sold as premium. As coffee people first, we've spent years sourcing and roasting specialty beans, and it felt wrong to let the coffee be the weakest link whenever we wanted to dabble into the infamous cocktail.

Midnight Oil's recipe is built on our own coffee liqueur, made with beans sourced from the region of Minas Gerais in Brazil, flash-brewed the way we'd pull a proper espresso — hot-brewed, then flash-chilled to lock in everything delicate that boiling and sitting around usually kills. We layered in aged Guyanese and Caribbean rum, Madagascan vanilla, Costa Rican cacao and British wheat vodka, then bottled the whole thing ready to pour, shake and serve.

That same late-night energy Dick Bradsell was chasing in 1983, we now pre-batch and bottle up, making a ready-to-drink, easy, accessible drink especially for people who give a sh*t about coffee - like us!