Drink Your Pornstar Martini In 3 Steps For The Ultimate Experience

The wide world of boozing is awash in numerous drinking rituals and traditions ranging from licking salt off your hand when you take a tequila shot to only adding an odd number of olives to your martini. Yet another tradition involves certain drinks being served with a chaser as a kind of boozy lagniappe, like the mini beer you get if you order a bloody mary in Milwaukee. The pornstar martini, too, comes with a sidecar of sorts: a few ounces of sparkling wine. The drink's inventor, Douglas Ankrah, liked to have his with a sort of boozy appetizer, as well. According to a YouTube video he recorded for the Bartenders Broadcast Network, before he drank or even mixed his signature martini, which he insisted was the U.K.'s most popular cocktail, he took a shot of Grey Goose vodka (Feel free to skip this step or substitute Costco's Kirkland vodka if you're on a budget).

The official pornstar ritual, however, starts with fishing out the passionfruit garnish and eating it (got to get that vitamin C!), then taking a sip of the martini. Take a few more sips, then stop to have some of the wine as a palate cleanser. Sip, rinse, and repeat until the martini is gone. That's how Ankrah always said it should be done, and it was his creation so he knew best. One thing he insisted on, though, was that you never, ever mix the wine with the cocktail, although he didn't prohibit two-fisting your double drink.

While it might seem as if the pornstar martini is a holdout from the naughty '80s when cringe-worthy drinks like Sex on the Beach and Screaming Orgasm were standard bar fare, it turns out the drink dates from the late '90s and the name was adopted for marketing purposes. At first, the pornstar martini was known by the rather mundane moniker of Maverick martini after the Capetown, South Africa bar where it was invented. Douglas Ankrah rechristened it a few years later, by which time he was mixing it up at a British bar called Townhouse. 

While the Maverick seemed to be doing okay with patrons, Ankrah wanted a new name for the drink, and he figured, hey, sex sells, right? This turned out to be a pretty smart move, as the risqué name alone seems to drive clicks as well as sales. Some 20-plus years after its debut, the pornstar martini has continued to be one of the internet's most searched-for drink recipes.

While there are numerous ways to spice up your pornstar martini if you don't care for the plain vanilla version, sadly, most of the official ones seem to have pretty boring names. Still, if you're mixing drinks at home, feel free to redub your riffs on the pornstar with whatever salacious names you'd like.

The standard pornstar martini starts with vanilla vodka, vanilla syrup, passionfruit liqueur, and lime juice, but the addition of rum and a bitter red aperitif turns it into a dry pornstar daiquiri. A few variants even have names that might be acceptable to Katy Perry's parents (As you may recall, the singer's ultra-conservative household renamed deviled eggs "angel eggs"). If you add either mamey or mango syrup to the drink, it turns into a cocktail known as Born a Star. For a completely family-friendly version, there's also a Movie Star mocktail. This alcohol-free drink is made by replacing the vodka with pineapple juice, the wine with sparkling cider or grape juice or a not-too-sweet soda, and the passionfruit liqueur with passionfruit syrup (or "just holding hands before marriage"-fruit syrup, to give it a Perry-proof moniker).