Aperitivo: Old Coffee Martini

The morning's leftover coffee is a great base for an afternoon cocktail.

Everywhere you go these days, the menu inevitably has an espresso martini. The original recipe is made with vodka, coffee liqueur, and espresso after a bar patron in London requested a drink that wake him up. Luckily, Illy, the European coffee company, was pushing espresso drinks at the time and an intrepid barman used the coffee for a new drink.

I don’t have a fancy espresso machine to easily pull a shot, but I sometimes have leftover coffee left in the pot. As an ingredient, it was probably just as good as fresh espresso.

I looked up a few recipes and went with 1 part old coffee, 1 part Kahlúa, 2 parts vodka. The recipe also called or simple syrup which I didn’t actually have, but I did have plenty of maraschino cherry juice. That’s basically simple syrup, so I topped it off with a little bit of the sweet juice.

The drink turned out good enough I made a second.