The Dirty Martini: Why It's Having a Moment

The Dirty Martini spent years as the cocktail snob's punching bag. Adding olive brine to a Martini was considered sacrilege by purists who believed the drink should be nothing but spirit and vermouth. Then somewhere around 2023, everyone quietly admitted that olive brine makes a Martini taste incredible, and the dirty version became one of the most ordered cocktails in major cities worldwide.

The recipe is straightforward: two and a half ounces of vodka or gin, half an ounce of dry vermouth, and half to one ounce of olive brine, depending on how dirty you like it. Stirred or shaken, strained into a chilled coupe, garnished with olives. The brine adds salinity and umami that make the drink savory and almost food-like in its complexity.

Check what the olives are packed in before you pour any of it. Most supermarket cocktail olives sit in a brine cut with vinegar and lactic acid, which makes the drink sour rather than saline. You want a jar whose label reads olives, water, salt and nothing else. Castelvetrano and Gordal both come packed that way, and a jar runs about £4. The brine is free, and you were going to eat the olives.

The quality revolution in olive products elevated the drink. Bars started using brine from Castelvetrano olives, blue cheese-stuffed olives, and even house-cured olives with specific brine blends. Filthy Food, a brand dedicated to premium cocktail garnishes, built a business largely on the back of the Dirty Martini boom, offering brine and olives specifically designed for the drink.

Celebrity endorsement helped. When high-profile figures from Margot Robbie to Bad Bunny were photographed with Dirty Martinis, the drink shed its outdated image and became aspirational again. It also photographs beautifully, the pale golden-green liquid in a classic glass reading as simultaneously classic and modern.

Batch it and keep it in the freezer. Stirring adds roughly a quarter of the drink's volume in water, so mix spirit, vermouth and brine in a bottle, add water at about 20 per cent of the total, and leave it at minus 18. It pours straight into a chilled glass with no ice and no stirring, and it is colder than anything you will manage by hand.

Vermouth is the thing that quietly ruins this drink. It is fortified wine, it oxidises, and the bottle open since Christmas is why your Martinis taste tired. Buy the 375ml Dolin Dry, keep it in the fridge, replace it monthly.

The Dirty Martini's comeback is ultimately about the broader acceptance that cocktails should taste good to the person drinking them, not satisfy some imaginary panel of judges. If you like salt and olives, you will love this drink. The gatekeepers lost, the olive brine won, and the rest of us get to enjoy a cocktail that is salty, cold, and deeply satisfying.

The version worth travelling for is at Dukes in St James's, where the trolley comes to the table, the gin and vermouth live in the freezer, and no ice touches the glass. They charge around £25 and hold you to two. The limit is not theatre. A Dukes Martini is essentially a chilled glass of neat spirit, and a third one ends the evening.

https://www.liquor.com/recipes/dirty-martini/