Wattleseed Espresso Martini

An Australian twist on the espresso martini using native wattleseed for its distinctive nutty, coffee-chocolate flavor.

The Wattleseed Espresso Martini combines the foundational London cocktail of Dick Bradsell's 1980s Soho career with an Australian native ingredient whose food history predates European settlement by tens of thousands of years. Wattleseed refers to the roasted and ground seeds of various Acacia species — principally Acacia victoriae and related trees — that Aboriginal Australians have harvested and prepared as food across the continent for at least 40,000 years. Eaten ground into a paste or cooked in various preparations, the seeds produce a flavor that is simultaneously nutty, roasted, and coffee-like, with secondary notes of hazelnut, chocolate, and grain. That flavor profile emerged independently in an arid continent without access to coffee, tea, or cocoa, yet produces a sensory experience that Western palates immediately recognize as belonging to the same family as those now-global beverages. The ingredient entered mainstream Australian food culture through the bush tucker movement of the 1980s and 1990s, when chefs including Kylie Kwong and Neil Perry began incorporating Aboriginal Australian ingredients into restaurant cooking, and by the 2010s wattleseed was available commercially as a roasted ground powder and extract. Combined with the Espresso Martini structure — vodka, coffee liqueur, and fresh espresso — wattleseed's roasted grain and hazelnut notes deepen and broaden the coffee profile, giving the Australian version a distinctly different aromatic character from the London original while remaining recognizably within the same cocktail family.