British searches for the Aperol Spritz fall by almost half between July and September, dropping from 186,882 a month to 100,880 last year, according to UK search volume data from Ahrefs. The Hugo Spritz falls harder still, from 82,354 in July 2025 to 36,081 in September, a decline of 56 per cent in eight weeks.
Two drinks go the other way at exactly the same moment. Searches for the Negroni barely move at all, sitting at 76,621 in July 2025 and 77,438 in September, before climbing to 86,174 in October, its strongest month of that year outside December. The Espresso Martini does something more dramatic. From 37,807 in September 2025 it rises to 43,850 in October, 67,134 in November and 187,305 in December, which is close to five times the September figure.
This year is following the same shape. The Aperol Spritz was on 162,359 searches in July 2026 and the Hugo on 83,277, both heading into the same September cliff. Mulled wine, which is the clearest seasonal marker in the whole dataset, sat at 1,801 in July and will climb past 100,000 by December if it repeats last year, when it went from 4,938 in September to 111,040 in December.
None of this is mysterious. The spritz is a weather drink. It came out of northern Italian aperitivo culture, it is built to be drunk outdoors in the late afternoon, and British interest in it tracks the British summer almost exactly. What is more interesting is the Negroni, because it has no season at all. It is the same bitter, spirit forward, room temperature proposition in February as in August, which is why the line on the chart is nearly flat while everything around it swings.
The Espresso Martini has a different explanation again. Dick Bradsell put it together in Soho in the mid 1980s for a customer who wanted something that would wake her up, and it spent thirty years as a late night order before becoming a Christmas fixture. Its December spike is not really about coffee, it is about party season, and the numbers make that plain. December is the only month all year when it draws more searches than the summer drinks, and it does so by a distance.
For anyone selling drinks, the practical read is that the changeover happens faster than most menus do. Bars and retailers that wait until October to swap the spritz for the darker, richer serves are already three or four weeks behind where the demand has gone, and the data suggests the switch is well underway by the second week of September.
David Baddeley, founder of Boozy, said: "Every year we watch the spritz numbers fall off a cliff in the first fortnight of September and every year a chunk of the trade is caught out by it. The interesting one is the Negroni though. It does not care what month it is, and there are not many drinks you can say that about. If you are planning an autumn range, that is the number worth looking at."
Boozy cans its cocktails in Greater Manchester and sells its Espresso Martini as a fixed 200ml serve, with the full shaken method, including the three coffee beans, published at its Espresso Martini recipe.
Anyone building the autumn drinks at home can check what they come to at the Cocktail ABV Calculator, which covers more than 100 recipes and returns the finished strength and the unit count for each one. The richer autumn serves tend to carry more alcohol per glass than a spritz does, which is worth knowing before the season turns.
Boozy asks everyone to drink responsibly. Guidance on units, weekly limits and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
