How to Make an Espresso Martini? What Ingredients Are Needed? How to Extract Espresso? Do Coffee and Alcohol Taste Good Together?

Everyone knows FrontStreet Coffee's main business is coffee! So today we're naturally going to talk about... cocktails!!

But this is no ordinary cocktail — this one contains espresso. And since espresso makes up a hefty share of the drink, the quality of the shot is inseparable from the quality of the cocktail. That's what makes this drink both simple and hard: simple because the ingredients are easy to gather; hard because it demands real competence in two crafts at once. So let's get slightly tipsy this winter and meet the world's most refreshing cocktail — the Espresso Martini!

Espresso Martini

The Espresso Martini is a new-generation cocktail derived from the martini. It was born in the 1980s at a London bar called Soho Brasserie (still open today), created by the famous bartender Dick Bradsell.

According to his daughter Bea, Dick invented the drink one night in the '80s when a supermodel walked into the bar and asked him — the bartender — for a very particular cocktail: one that would both wake her up and get her drunk (her exact words: "wake me up, then fxxk me up."). Think of it as a "vibrant black." By pure coincidence, the bar had just installed an espresso machine — installed, even more coincidentally, right next to the bar. Dick seized the moment, combined espresso with vodka, and balanced the flavors with coffee liqueur and syrup. A cocktail that refreshes and intoxicates in the same glass was born!

The Espresso Martini's fame grew from there — countless tourists visit that bar every year just to taste it at the source. Interestingly, although the drink was born in London, it became Australia's most popular cocktail, thanks to the many bars there that evolved from cafés. And though the ingredient list looks simple, the drink quietly challenges any bartender: espresso fills a full third of the glass, so the shot largely determines the taste of the whole cocktail.

So the bartender must not only know cocktail mixing but also know how to pull a quality espresso. Most bars have no coffee machine at all, and even where one exists, bartenders rarely get formal training and can't extract a good shot. Simple ingredients, difficult execution.

And once a quality shot is pulled, the recipe needs adjusting to match it. Say the beans are dark roasted and the espresso comes out full of roast smoke and chocolate bitterness — the bartender then has to add sugar to tame it, because a proper Espresso Martini balances vodka, espresso, and sweet coffee liqueur perfectly. Not as simple as it looks.

How to Make an Espresso Martini?

Cocktail-making isn't exactly FrontStreet Coffee's specialty — but there's a bar right next door!!! So we handle the espresso, the neighbors handle the shaking, and together the professional gaps cancel out.

Dick's original called for 25ml of ristretto, so we also went with a short ristretto extraction. (FrontStreet Coffee covered the key points of ristretto extraction in yesterday's article, for those interested.) The recipe: 20g of grounds, extracted over 28 seconds to yield 30ml. Our house espresso blend, the medium-dark Warm Sun Blend, combined with the short extraction, gives low bitterness and extremely high sweetness — so the bartender dialed the sugar back slightly. Final build: 50ml vodka, 30ml coffee liqueur, 5ml sugar syrup, and 25ml espresso. Method: pour everything in, stir well, transfer to a shaker full of ice and shake hard. Once the ingredients whip up a rich foam in the shaker, strain it into a cocktail glass!

Finally, garnish the dense foam with three coffee beans, kiss them with a torch to release their aroma, and it's ready to enjoy.

One small sip: first the dense texture of the foam, then the cocktail's full flavor. As we said, the balance among the three elements holds — nothing masks anything else, nothing sticks out, everything blends. The whiskey aroma and berry notes native to the Warm Sun Blend make the drink richer and more layered, and the texture, far from heavy, is remarkably smooth. Overall: excellent!! Delicious — we recommend you try making one yourself.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The Espresso Martini is only as good as its shot. From our espresso bean lineup, here are three that will hold their own in the shaker — or simply in a demitasse:

FrontStreet Warm Sun Blend — The medium-dark house blend used in this recipe: whiskey and berry aromatics with chocolate depth and high sweetness at a short ristretto extraction. Its low bitterness means you can ease off the sugar in the build — exactly what a balanced Espresso Martini needs.

FrontStreet Classic Blend — Designed for espresso and moka pot work, with exceptionally thick, velvety crema that even beginners on basic home machines can pull. The traditional Mamba (Mandheling + Brazil) recipe gives a mellow, full-bodied cup — a perfect backbone for martinis, lattes, and Dirty.

FrontStreet Brazil Fazenda Rainha SOE (Yellow Bourbon, medium-dark roast) — Low acidity, gentle sweetness, and chocolate, nut, and cream aromatics; the balanced profile also stabilizes extraction. As an espresso it reads as butter cookies, macadamia, and toasted bread — a crowd-pleasing single-origin martini.