When life gives you the resurgence of a once-vogue cocktail in a season dominated by one flavor, there’s only one thing to do: you make lemonade a pumpkin spice espresso martini.

Bloomingdale pasta spot Red Hen has been selling the drink since early September. (Axios DC first reported the menu addition). It marries two zeitgeisty beverages that people love to love, and also love to hate: the pumpkin spice latte, now widely known by the initials PSL, and the espresso martini, a cocktail that saw its zenith in the 1990s and became almost ubiquitous in the past year during a mid-pandemic revival.

Red Hen’s Beverage director Sam Nellis, a PSL fan himself, came up with the idea for the pumpkin spice espresso martini (PSEM?) in April, but waited to put it on the menu.

“It wasn’t exactly seasonally appropriate,” Nellis said. “I just waited until the end of September to put it on the menu, and I think people are responding really well to it.”

Judging by Red Hen’s social media, that’s true.

“Good god, I never knew I needed this in my life before,” reads one comment under Red Hen’s PSEM Instagram photo.

The “PS” of the PSEM comes from what Nellis has dubbed “pumpkin spice sweet cream.” He uses it in place of a traditional espresso martini’s simple syrup. The mixture of sweetened condensed milk, agave nectar, water, and the traditional pumpkin spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice) gives the drink a creamy feel. Instead of an espresso shot, Nellis uses cold brew — a more shelf-stable substitute, he says, that removes the hassle of shaking a hot espresso shot into a cold drink. Caffe amaro, a coffee liqueur that’s also a bitter amaro, deepens and spices the drink, and a shot of vodka completes it. According to Nellis, it’s something to order for or with dessert, and not the cocktail you’d pair with your plate of squid ink linguini.

“Our [pumpkin spice espresso martini] is taking the same sort of approach that we take to any drink here, which is craft first, using really good ingredients, using some interesting techniques, trying to make the best drink we possibly can,” Nellis says. “It just happens to be something that is also part of the zeitgeist.”

Part of the zeitgeist, it is.

The trope of a PSL-drinking, UGG-boot wearing, infinity-scarf wrapping “basic white girl” is now all too familiar (as is its younger sister, Christian Girl Autumn). But the continued popularity of the PSL — and the pumpkin spice-infused aisles of Trader Joe’s from August to December — suggests that the pumpkin spice phenomenon is baked (pun intended) into the mainstream. The flavor can appear in almost anything, from Land-O-Lakes butter, to another omnipresent alcohol trend, hard seltzer. And the PSL itself has spread far beyond Starbucks to the menu of countless small coffee shops. This year, the National Landing BID is even hosting a PSL Competition (a combination of words that would seem nonsensical a few years ago).

The espresso martini enjoyed similar popularity during its peak decades ago. It allegedly originated with a London bartender in the 1980s, who says he invented the drink after a “young model” walked in and asked for something that would “wake me up, then fuck me up.” The pandemic breathed new life into the espresso martini, amid a general wave of ‘90s and early aughts nostalgia. It became a favored pick-me-up in 2021, albeit to the chagrin of some bartenders. Washingtonian reported on the trend this summer, with one D.C. bartender clocking sometimes 60 orders per night.

Washingtonian food writer Jessica Sidman captured the essence of Red Hen’s PSEM, tweeting that the autumnal libation is “definitely peak something.” And Nellis doesn’t see that as a bad review.

“I think that some of the hesitancy to get behind pumpkin spice drinks has less to do with the drinks themselves, and more to do with who likes them,” Nellis says. “Which I personally have a bigger issue with…don’t just not like something because a certain group of people likes it.”

For some drinkers, the appeal of Red Hen’s on-theme martini might lie more in the novelty of two overlapping trends than in its taste. Those searching for the “fall in a cup” coziness of a PSL might not find it in a PSEM; it’s served cold, and without the overwhelming sweetness of a latte. But anyone searching for an excuse to order something fun (and Instagrammable) after a year of at-home cocktails might find themselves leaning fully into the frou-frou.

“I don’t think there’s something so much more sophisticated about any other drink,” Nellis says. “We just like to use really high quality ingredients, and you know, a couple of cool, frou-frou-ey cocktail techniques.”

Red Hen will be serving the pumpkin spice espresso martini until early December.