Earl Grey MarTEAni

Wayfinder

The Earl Grey MarTEAni is the cocktail renaissance drinking tea: gin infused with Earl Grey, shaken with lemon, sugar and egg white into a sour wearing a scented foam. Audrey Saunders built it in the early 2000s and it became a house classic at her Pegu Club, the New York bar that spent fifteen years teaching America to drink gin again. The infusion is the whole trick. Bergamot sits close to gin’s own citrus botanicals, so the tea reads as an extension of the spirit rather than a flavour bolted on, while its tannin gives the drink a dry grip that plain gin sours never have. The egg white then does what egg white does, softening that grip into silk, and the lemon oil expressed over the foam finishes the work before the first sip starts. The name’s pun has dated better than most: beneath it is a serious drink, precise about its ratios and unbothered by fashion, that turned a thousand bars on to tea as an ingredient. Twenty years on, it remains the standard the copies are measured against.

ShakenClassic

Glassware: Coupe Glass

Garnish: Lemon Twist Expressed over the foam and rested on the rim

Ingredients

Serves

Earl Grey-Infused Gin

50ml

The bergamot engine: one tablespoon of loose leaf per 250ml of gin, one to two hours, then strained. Tea tannin does work vermouth cannot.

Fresh Lemon Juice

20ml

The sour's spine: sharp enough to cut tannin and silk alike. Twenty millilitres against the same measure of syrup is the balance the tea's grip assumes.

Simple Syrup

20ml

Balance for the tea’s grip: the tannin reads drier than a plain gin sour, so the syrup runs a touch higher.

Egg White

15ml

The silk: foam that carries bergamot to the nose and softens the tannin underneath. Fifteen millilitres is about half a white, and more than that mutes the tea.

Instructions

Infuse the gin ahead of time: one tablespoon of loose Earl Grey per 250ml of gin, steeped for one to two hours at room temperature, then strained through a fine sieve.

Dry shake the infused gin, lemon juice, syrup and egg white without ice.

Add cubed ice and shake hard until well chilled.

Double strain into a chilled coupe.

Express the lemon twist over the foam and rest it on the rim.

Expert Tip

Strain the infusion on time. The difference between two hours and an evening is the difference between bergamot and stewed tannin, and no amount of syrup recovers an over-steeped gin. Set a timer and strain through a fine sieve. Dry shake first, always. Ten seconds without ice lets the egg white unwind and build structure, and the iced shake afterwards chills and tightens what the first created. Reverse the order and the foam comes out thin and short-lived. Fifteen millilitres of egg white is about half a white, and the restraint is deliberate: too much egg mutes the tea the infusion worked to capture, which defeats the whole exercise. Chill the coupe properly too, since a warm glass collapses the foam inside a minute and takes the drink's poise with it.

Flavour Profile

BergamotCitrusSilkyDry

The Origin

Audrey Saunders trained under Dale DeGroff at the Rainbow Room and became one of the architects of the modern cocktail revival, and the Earl Grey MarTEAni is among her signatures, created in the early 2000s during her years running serious New York bars. When she opened Pegu Club on Houston Street in 2005, a bar built explicitly around gin at a time when vodka owned the back bar, the drink went with her and stayed a fixture of the menu for the bar’s fifteen-year run. Its logic was missionary. Saunders wanted vodka drinkers to meet gin halfway, and tea was the bridge: familiar, domestic, faintly ceremonial, and a natural partner for a spirit whose botanicals already lean on citrus peel. Pegu Club closed in 2020, but the drink had long since left the building, appearing on menus from London to Brisbane under its own name, the pun apparently indestructible.

The Infusion

Cold infusion is the method, and it is deliberately unheroic: a tablespoon of good loose leaf Earl Grey per 250ml of gin, one to two hours of contact at room temperature, then a strain through a fine sieve. Time matters more than anything else in the recipe. Under an hour the bergamot is faint and the drink shakes up as an ordinary sour; much past two hours the tannin turns aggressive, the way tea stewed in the pot does, and no amount of syrup recovers it. Leaf quality tells too, since the infusion amplifies whatever it is given, and a citrus-forward London dry takes the tea most gracefully, the bergamot knitting into the botanicals rather than sitting on top of them. The infused gin keeps for weeks in a sealed bottle away from light, which makes the MarTEAni a far better party drink than its technique suggests: the slow work happens days ahead, and the service is just a sour.

The Foam

The dry shake is the difference between foam and froth. Shaken first without ice, the egg white unwinds and builds structure; the second, iced shake then chills and tightens what the first created, and the double strain polishes it. Fifteen millilitres is roughly half a white, and the restraint is deliberate, since too much egg mutes the tea the infusion worked to capture. Done properly the foam stands a few millimetres proud of the liquid and holds the expressed lemon oil on its surface, so the nose meets bergamot and bright citrus before the palate meets acid, which is the drink’s whole choreography. Aquafaba at the same measure is the accepted substitute for the egg-shy and shakes up nearly identically. What cannot be substituted is the chill: a warm coupe collapses the foam inside a minute and takes the drink’s poise with it.

How to Serve It

A chilled coupe, a double strain, a single twist, and nothing else on the glass. It sits happily where tea itself sits, mid-afternoon into early evening, and its tannic grip makes it a better aperitif than its silk suggests. It suits occasions with a little ceremony in them, which is why it has become a fixture of the better sort of wedding, and one is usually the right number, since the drink is quiet about carrying a full measure of gin and the foam makes it drink faster than a sour has any right to. For a crowd, infuse a whole bottle days ahead and shake to order in pairs: the infusion scales perfectly, and the theatre of the foam is worth keeping per glass rather than surrendering to a punch bowl.

The Spirit

Gin

A flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

Which gin should I infuse?

A citrus-forward London dry takes the tea best: the bergamot in Earl Grey is itself a citrus oil, so the two knit together rather than competing. Save heavily floral or savoury gins for other work, since they end up arguing with the tea instead of extending it.

Can I skip the egg white?

You lose the drink's signature texture and the foam that carries the aroma to the nose before the acid reaches the palate. Aquafaba at the same fifteen-millilitre measure is the accepted substitute and shakes up almost identically, so there is no need to go without.

How long does the infused gin keep?

Weeks, in a sealed bottle kept away from light. The important thing is to strain it properly at the two-hour mark, because leaves left in the bottle keep working and turn the whole thing bitter and tannic within a day or so.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

White Lady

The White Lady was created by Harry MacElhone at Ciro's Club in London in 1919, in an early form built on crème de menthe, and then substantially revised by MacElhone himself at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1929, when he replaced the mint with gin and added egg white. The earlier drink carries the same name and is a different thing entirely. The 1929 revision is the one ordered today. Gin, Cointreau and fresh lemon in a ratio that seats the gin clearly in front, with the liqueur and the acid holding a balanced frame around it. The official specification stops there; MacElhone's own rebuild adds an egg white, and that version is below. It is often described as a Sidecar made with gin, which is accurate as far as it goes and misses the specific relationship between juniper and Cointreau's orange. The two sit at adjacent points in the canon rather than one being a substitution of the other.

Bee’s Knees

The Bee’s Knees is a gin sour built on honey syrup instead of sugar, documented in the early 1920s and born of a practical problem. Prohibition gin was frequently terrible, and honey and lemon are both strongly flavoured enough to cover for a spirit that needed covering for. What makes it worth making now is the inversion. The combination chosen to hide a bad gin turns out to be exceptionally good at showing off a good one, because honey and gin occupy overlapping territory. Gin is defined by botanicals; honey is itself a botanical product, its character set by whatever the bees visited. The honey does not simply sweeten the gin, it extends it in a register the gin already occupies. Three ingredients, no egg, nothing complicated. Built with a proper London Dry and a properly made honey syrup it is brighter and more layered than the ingredient list has any right to suggest.