Featured Stories
Espresso Yourself: A History of Melbourne's Love Affair With the Espresso Martini
18 Mar 2022
Melbourne is very serious about coffee. New wave roasters, inventive baristas and discerning drinkers are pushing the frontier of global coffee culture forward in Australia’s cultural capital. Unsurprisingly, here on the streets of this coffee-obsessed city the espresso martini has shifted from essential to eternal.
While other popular cocktails have long been erased from drinks menus (here’s looking at you dear cosmopolitan), the caffeinated cocktail has cemented itself as a mainstay ready to jump start a big night or keep your party kicking into the wee hours. Once a year Melbourne even hosts a sell-out espresso martini festival, proving this jolting drink is more popular than ever.
Relatively new in cocktail terms, a London bartender named Dick Bradsel invented the boozy, buzzy drink in the early 80s when a famous model asked for a drink that would wake her up. He combined coffee and vodka and the rest is history. “When I was younger, the espresso martini was my favourite drink,” says Stephen Zappelli, venue manager at Curious at the W Melbourne.
Bartender making Espresso Martini at Curious, W Melbourne
After getting his introduction to bartending in his hometown of East Gippsland, Zappelli went to London to learn and worked his way to the position of head bartender at influential London bar, The Alchemist.
“It was one of the first cocktails I ever attempted to make. The way that Melbournians embraced cafes was super high. Throughout the day, everyone just wants coffee and then in the afternoon, it was espresso martinis.” While the espresso martini can be ordered and enjoyed at rowdy pubs, loud nightclubs and hidden speakeasies across the city, not everywhere shakes up this caffeinated cocktail with balance and creativity.
Inspired by Melbourne’s ever-evolving coffee scene, a new generation of bartenders are pushing the drink beyond its white-spirit-plus-coffee-liqueur-plus-coffee envelope.
Heavyweight cocktail bar Eau de Vie, for example, utilises a saffron-vanilla mousse and liquid nitrogen to produce a modern version of the drink; Bar Clara produces an all-Australian espresso martini; East African-themed Glamp swaps vodka for spiced rum and adds creamy Amarula and blackberry liqueur; and golden era champagne bar Nick & Nora’s tops a mixture of aged rum, coffee and sweet sherry with a tonka and vanilla bean mousse.
Cocktails at Nick & Nora’s Melbourne
In the heart of the city, Curious at the W Melbourne has dedicated an entire section of its drinks menu to coffee-based cocktails, including its much-vaunted version sealed with a thin layer of beeswax.
Bartender Zappelli and his team have been working on adding new riffs on Melbourne’s favourite coffee-based cocktail, including an intriguing drink with the working title “Overroast” that features an orgeat made with roasted macadamia and wattleseed, mead, and a house-made liqueur made with spent coffee sourced from the hotel’s coffee shop.
While the raw ingredients of many classic cocktails can only be improved on to a point, new innovations in sourcing, roasting and brewing is giving Melbourne’s bartenders plenty of material to shake up the post-dinner pick-me-up. And so, the city’s love affair with espresso – and espresso martinis – continues.
Cocktails at Curious, W Melbourne
