Pickle Martini Recipe | Wine Enthusiast

In August 2022, the Rome-based food writer and food-tour host Elizabeth Minchilli reshared a video she posted in 2020 demonstrating how to make a dirty gin martini using brine from her homemade dill pickles.

“Apparently me and my pickle martini are trending,” she wrote, referencing the hundreds of thousands of views and likes it had amassed, seemingly overnight. “I’ve been drinking pickle martinis since before many of you were born.”

It’s been two years since Minchilli’s viral post helped jumpstart the pickletini’s rise to “It Cocktail” status, but momentum has scarcely slowed.

The #picklemartini hashtag has racked up TikTok views into the millions, and Google searches for the drink maintain a steady climb.

Beyond a Trend

Pickle-brine cocktails have cropped up on drink menus from Pastis, in Miami, to Albert’s Bar and Gertrude’s, in New York, and in Clemson, South Carolina, where it’s a favorite of locals at the Tiger Town Tavern.

Some places are looking to other pickled goodies for inspiration, like at Makan, in Charleston, where pickled-serrano brine accents the namesake Pickled Serrano Martinez with Hayman’s Old Tom gin, Dolin Bianco Vermouth and a dash of Regan’s orange bitters. Likewise, ilili in Washington, D.C. features A Little Pick‘le’ Me Up with Jun Gin, pickled shishito pepper, onion brine and arak rinse.

The pickletini trend has broached retail beverage shelves, too, in forms such as Dirty Dill’s pickle vodka and the pickle-flavored spritz line from Spritz Society and Claussen.

Pickles have been riding their own upward wave in recent years, thanks partly to fermentation’s glowing association with wellness amid the rise of buzzwords like “gut health.” Then again, nostalgia probably has a lot more to do with the flurry of pickle-infused products that have hit the market in recent years, from potato chips and beef jerky to hummus, mustard and ice cream.

The same could be said for the soaring popularity of the martini and its many variations, which rode to star status on a wave of ’90s and early-aughts nostalgia. It was only a matter of time before the two collided, yielding a dirty martini with a snappier, savory tang and striking radioactive green tinge.

Surprising Origins

As Minchilli intimated, the pickletini has been around since long before the internet deemed it cool. The carpeted, decades-old pub, Rustic Cafe, in East Lyme, Connecticut, has menued pickletinis—alongside 88 variations of pickleback shots—since its current owners took over in 2010 (and accepted a dare from regulars).

While the combination of spirits and pickle juice might sound novel at first, it’s actually a centuries-old tradition in places like Russia and Poland to chase spirits with pickles or brine—both to take the bite out of the shot and, purportedly, prevent the next day’s hangover.

But the pairing became more popular with the rise of the pickleback. Rumor has it that pairing shots of pickle juice and (traditionally) cheap whiskey originated in 2006, at the ironically named Brooklyn tavern Bushwick Country Club. A patron asked the bartender for a shot of brine from the jar of McClure’s spicy dill pickles he was munching on to chase her Old Crow bourbon.

“People like pickles—period,” says Rachel Jackson, partner at “Jew-ish” diner Gertie and sibling bistro Gertrude’s. “I’m a huge fan of savory cocktails in general, and I think that people are also realizing that, especially in a restaurant setting, a sweet cocktail is doing nothing for them in terms of their dining experience; whereas a savory cocktail can enhance certain dishes in the same way a glass of wine can.”

When Jackson and husband/co-founder Nate Adler were dreaming up the menu for Gertie, housemade pickles factored heavily, as part of their personal food identities and a “quintessential part of the Jewish food scene in New York City,” Jackson says.

Rather than dump the excess dill pickle brine down the drain, they reserved the herbaceous, savory-sweet liquid and stirred it with ISCO Aquavit, which bears earthy notes of caraway and licorice, and fruity, dry Routin French vermouth. The drink, dubbed the Dirty Gertie, was so popular that they added it to the opening menu at Gertrude’s when it debuted last year. It remains Gertrude’s best-selling cocktail.

“It’s herby, savory and briny—with more sweetness and complexity than you’d get from pouring olive juice into a dirty martini—especially with the amount of vermouth that’s in there,” Jackson says. “It’s a fun brunch cocktail, if you can wrap your head around drinking a martini at brunch.”

Mark Murphy, bar director for Starr Restaurants, developed his take on a pickletini for the Parisian bistro Pastis’s Miami outpost, which opened last May. Le Petit Pickle is indeed petite, at just 1.5 ounces in a three-ounce martini glass, and doesn’t contain any pickle brine despite its name.

“The funny thing is, the impetus was a cornichon, but I don’t actually use any cornichon brine in it,” Murphy says. Finding the brine too aggressively acidic, he built a bright, savory composite brine by mixing olive and cocktail onion brine with verjus for an acidic edge that’s “not overtly vinegary.”

The cocktail’s instant success inspired him to add it to menus at Pastis’s Washington, D.C. and New York City locations, too. “It just exploded last year,” he says. “Now, it’s just pickle everything, everywhere.”

He wonders aloud if our current pickletini obsession is simply due to its clickbaity appeal on social media. (This viral giant pickletini makes a strong case for such an argument.) And yet, who can resist the nostalgic, sweet and savory tang of a dill pickle in cocktail form?

“As a savory cocktail, it’s great,” Jackson says. “People are taking it to extremes, doing all sorts of nutty stuff. But kitsch is really fun if it’s done in a way that tastes good.”

Photography by Liz Clayman