Nearly half of British 18 to 29 year olds say they would rather end a meal with an Espresso Martini than an espresso, and the cocktail has held fifth place on the list of the world's bestselling classics as International Coffee Day approaches on Thursday 1 October.
The ranking comes from the Drinks International Cocktail Report 2026, the trade magazine's annual survey of leading bars around the world. The Negroni topped it for a fifth consecutive year, followed by the Margarita, the Old Fashioned and the Dry Martini, with the Espresso Martini fifth and the Daiquiri sixth. Not everything held on. The Pornstar Martini, created in London in the early 2000s, dropped 15 places to 26th, one of the sharpest falls in the table.
The generational divide behind the coffee serve was measured separately by the Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report 2026, compiled with the foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory from a survey of 11,000 people across 11 markets, a thousand of them in the UK. It found that 48% of UK respondents aged 18 to 29 would choose an Espresso Martini over an espresso at the end of a meal, against 20% of those over 45. Asked about an Americano, 31% of the younger group thought first of the cocktail rather than the coffee, compared with 9% of the older one.
Coffee is not a small habit in Britain. The British Coffee Association puts national consumption at around 98 million cups a day, up from roughly 70 million in 2008, and its research with the Centre for Economics and Business Research found a quarter of that is drunk at work or while studying.
International Coffee Day itself is a recent invention. The International Coffee Organization, the intergovernmental body that has overseen the global coffee agreements since 1963, launched the first official one in Milan on 1 October 2015 as part of Expo 2015, pulling a scatter of separate national coffee days onto a single date. Its purpose is less celebration than advocacy, drawing attention to the position of the smallholder farmers who grow most of the world's coffee and to the price swings they live with.
The Espresso Martini is younger than most of the drinks above it in the ranking. Dick Bradsell made the first one at the Soho Brasserie on Old Compton Street in the late 1980s, for a customer who wanted something that would wake her up, combining vodka, fresh espresso, coffee liqueur and sugar syrup. He called it the Vodka Espresso, and the martini name attached itself later on the strength of the glass rather than the recipe. It was not the first coffee cocktail either. Irish Coffee dates to the 1940s and the White Russian to the 1960s, but neither travelled the way Bradsell's did.
One caveat travels with it. Drinkaware is clear that caffeine does not cancel out alcohol, and that feeling more alert after a coffee based drink is not the same as being less affected by what is in the glass.
Boozy cans its own Espresso Martini in Greater Manchester, and the Espresso Martini recipe it is built from is published in full for anyone who would rather shake it themselves. It also produces the best selling espresso martini gift set. The White Russian recipe is on the site too, for those heading in a creamier direction.
"The Espresso Martini is the one drink people order in a bar and then try to recreate at home, usually badly, because it lives or dies on a fresh shot and a hard shake," said David Baddeley, founder of Boozy. "What has changed is that it stopped being an end of night drink. We see it moving earlier in the evening, and on International Coffee Day it is the obvious point where the two industries meet."
The Cocktail ABV Calculator on the Boozy site covers more than 100 recipes and returns the finished strength and unit count of a serve, which is worth a look before a second round of anything coffee based. Please drink responsibly. Guidance on units and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
