Amarula Espresso Martini

A South African take on the classic espresso martini, replacing standard cream with Amarula's distinctive marula fruit liqueur for a fruity, velvety finish.

The Amarula Espresso Martini adapts Dick Bradsell's mid-1980s London creation to showcase Amarula Cream Liqueur — South Africa's most internationally recognized spirit product — in place of the standard coffee liqueur, producing a coffee cocktail that reflects both the South African cream liqueur tradition and the global Espresso Martini revival. Bradsell created the original at the Soho Brasserie in London in the mid-1980s with vodka, fresh espresso, Kahlúa, and sugar syrup. Amarula Cream Liqueur was launched in 1989 by South African Distillers (now Distell, a subsidiary of Heineken International) using the fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea), a medium-sized tree native to sub-Saharan Africa whose fruit has been consumed by local communities for thousands of years. The cream liqueur version combined marula fruit distillate with fresh cream in a formula positioned directly against Baileys Irish Cream in the global market. In the Espresso Martini context, Amarula's tropical fruit character and vanilla-cream notes produce a version whose flavor is simultaneously coffee-forward and fruity-creamy — a combination that South African bartenders developed and that spread internationally as both the Espresso Martini's global revival and international interest in African spirits grew through the early 2020s.