Why Does Everyone on Below Deck Drink Espresso Martinis?

Watch enough Below Deck and you start to notice it before the drama even lands. Whatever the season, whatever the yacht, whatever fresh interpersonal disaster is brewing in the galley, someone is always shaking an espresso martini. Charter guests order them by the tray. Crew order them on their one night off. It turns up before dinner, after dinner, instead of dinner, and at two in the morning when everyone should really be in bed. If the franchise has a mascot, it is not a captain or a chief stew. It is a coupe of cold coffee and vodka with three beans bobbing on the foam.

The best explanation for all of it came from a former crew member, and it is beautifully short. Asked by a fan why everyone on the show seems welded to the drink, former Below Deck stewardess Courtney Skippon reportedly gave a three-word answer: “Because they are tired.” That is the entire article, really. Everything else is just showing the working.

Yacht crew work absurd hours. A charter day can start before the guests wake and end long after they finally stagger off to bed, and it does that for days on end with barely a gap. When the crew finally get a night out, they are running on fumes, and they still want to enjoy it. That is the exact problem the espresso martini was built to solve: it is a drink that promises to switch you back on. Whether or not it truly does is another matter, but the promise is the point. When you are shattered and refuse to waste your only evening off, a vodka and coffee that says “second wind” is a very easy thing to order, and then order again.

Even the crew who make them will tell you it is the most popular drink on the boat. Below Deck Med stew Julia d’Albert Pusey has said the espresso martini was coming back into fashion around her season and was, without a doubt, the drink everyone wanted. She also made the point that any working stewardess feels in their forearms: it is quick enough on its own, but a big simultaneous order, each one needing fresh espresso, a hard shake and an individual strain, is genuinely painful on a slow machine. The crew are not drinking espresso martinis because they are easy to serve. They are drinking them because they are knackered.

Flip it around to the guest side and the logic only gets stronger. Charter guests have paid a spectacular amount of money for a very short window, a few days at most, and there is a powerful urge to wring every last hour out of it. Sleep feels like waste. Dinner rolls into drinks, drinks roll into the hot tub, and nobody wants to be the person who calls it a night while the yacht they have hired by the day is still lit up. An espresso martini is the perfect enabler. It arrives looking like pudding and pretending to be a pick-me-up, and it lets a table that should be winding down convince itself it is just getting started.

Bravo itself treats the drink as shorthand for exactly this kind of demanding, keep-it-coming luxury. In one of its own articles about a stingy tip, Bravo described the crew’s job as everything from managing dietary requirements to hauling heavy water toys to making sure guests “always had a fresh espresso martini in hand.” When the network reaches for a single image to sum up bottomless high-end service, that is the one it picks.

If one person cemented the espresso martini as part of the Below Deck identity, it was Kate Chastain. She was the original show’s defining chief stew across six seasons, the one fielding the endless drinks orders and running the interior, and she was not just making the things for guests. She drank them herself, openly and often. Bravo once ran a piece on her posting a photo of one at sunset from Phuket with the caption “Espresso martini in every country I visit.” When the most quotable person in the cast adopts a drink as a personal signature, it stops being a background prop and becomes part of the show’s furniture, as fixed as the tip meeting and the crew night out.

Beyond the tiredness, the drink is almost suspiciously well suited to yacht life. Start with the practical bit: the ingredients are already aboard. A superyacht carries serious coffee kit as standard, because guests paying that kind of money expect proper espresso, cappuccinos and after-dinner coffee on demand. The bar is already stocked with vodka, and coffee liqueur is a small, sensible thing to keep on board. So unlike some fussy signature cocktail that needs an obscure amaro flown in from Turin, the espresso martini can be built from things the boat was always going to have. That is not the same as saying it is effortless, mind. Ten of them at once will ruin a stewardess’s evening. But the raw materials are a given.

Then there is the fact that it slides into every part of the day. It works as an aperitivo, as an after-dinner drink in place of coffee, as a liquid dessert, as the opening salvo of a late party, and as a stiffener before everyone piles into the tender to go ashore. On a short charter the normal boundaries between dinner, dessert, coffee and going out dissolve completely, and the espresso martini is the one drink that fits all of those slots at once. It is also, frankly, made for television. In the glass it reads as expensive instantly: the dark coffee body, the pale crema, the coffee-bean garnish, the theatrical hard shake. A tumbler of vodka and an energy drink would do a similar job chemically and look like nothing at all. That the drink happens to photograph like money is our observation, not something Bravo has ever confirmed, but it is hard to unsee.

Last, it is approachable in a way that flatters everyone involved. It tastes sophisticated but it is fundamentally sweetened alcoholic coffee, so a guest does not need a working knowledge of vermouth or bitters or barrel-aged anything to feel like they have ordered something classy. It is grown-up without being intimidating, which is exactly the register a charter guest wants to be in.

The clearest sign of how central this drink has become is that it has graduated from background prop to plot device. In Below Deck Sailing Yacht’s fifth season, in an episode literally titled “Bean Counter,” stewardess Diana Cruz served a guest an espresso martini garnished with only two coffee beans instead of the customary three. The guest was not having it. He flagged it as bad luck, said he loved health and wealth but needed the happiness too, and rather than simply dropping in a third bean, Diana informed him she would be switching him to decaf from here on. A colleague later remade it properly, three beans present and correct, and harmony was restored. Bravo cut a dedicated preview around the exchange, which tells you everything about how much mileage the show now gets from a garnish.

So why does the third bean matter? The three-bean garnish is usually traced to the Italian custom of serving sambuca “con la mosca”, with three coffee beans, said to represent health, wealth and happiness. In that tradition odd numbers are the lucky ones, and serving someone two or four beans is treated as a small social slight. It is worth being clear that this is cocktail tradition and superstition rather than hard historical law: three beans traditionally stand for health, wealth and happiness, and some drinkers consider fewer than three unlucky. The guest was leaning on folklore, not a rulebook. But on a boat whose entire product is flawless service, folklore is enough to start a row.

Tempting as it is to hand the show the credit, the honest answer is no, not on its own. Below Deck premiered in 2013, but the espresso martini’s big modern comeback really gathered pace in the late 2010s and early 2020s, driven by the broader cocktail revival rather than by one reality series. The numbers from that surge are startling. Bacardi’s 2023 Cocktail Trends Report found that 58% of surveyed bartenders were interested in espresso martinis, ranking it the fifth most popular cocktail among UK respondents, and cited Yelp data showing mentions up nearly 300% in the first half of 2021 against the same stretch of 2018. On-premise data from Union told the same story, with the drink growing 50% in the year to September 2023 to become its third best-selling cocktail, elbowing the Moscow Mule down a place.

What Below Deck almost certainly did do is pour petrol on a fire that was already lit. It took a real hospitality trend and beamed it, over and over, into millions of homes, welded to images of yachts, sunsets and money. And that is where the interesting bit starts, because it looks a lot like a loop. Guests order espresso martinis on charter. The show broadcasts it relentlessly. Viewers file the drink under “yacht luxury” in their heads. Some of those viewers then order one to feel a bit like they are on a superyacht, and some of them become charter guests who arrive already primed to want the drink they associate with the fantasy. The show films even more of them. Round it goes.

Fans clearly feel the loop too, because the questions come up constantly online: why does every guest order one, is it a specifically European or yachting thing, are people just copying earlier seasons. Somewhere in those threads the espresso martini earned its perfect nickname, the idea that it is essentially a vodka Red Bull that went off and studied abroad. That is the whole appeal in a sentence. It is the energy-drink-and-spirits combination that conservative, well-heeled drinkers can order without feeling like a student, dressed up just enough to belong on a yacht.

One myth needs holding underwater for a moment, because the entire “pick-me-up” premise leans on it. The caffeine in an espresso martini does not undo the alcohol. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, caffeine does not change how alcohol affects your body: it does not lower your blood-alcohol concentration, it does not help your liver work faster, and it does not reduce impairment. What it does is make you feel more alert, which is arguably worse, because feeling awake can mask how drunk you actually are and encourage you to keep drinking well past the point you would otherwise have stopped. The espresso might keep a Below Deck party going until sunrise. It does not make a single person aboard less drunk.

Here is the part that makes the whole thing feel almost too neat. The espresso martini is generally credited to the London bartender Dick Bradsell, who built an early version in the 1980s after a young woman asked him for a drink that would wake her up and then get her drunk. Her identity has never been settled, and despite what the internet insists, it was not Kate Moss. If you want the full detective story, we went looking for the unidentified model behind the espresso martini and came back without a suspect but with the myth firmly debunked. The point for our purposes is the brief she gave Bradsell. Wake me up, then get me drunk. That is not just the origin of the cocktail. That is the Below Deck charter in six words. The drink was, in effect, designed for people who are exhausted, celebrating and refusing to go to bed, which describes almost everyone who has ever set foot on that boat.