Amid the hullabaloo of London Cocktail Week and The World’s 50 Best Bars 2014, I had fallen short on my usual preparations for interview. Arriving to meet Alfred Cointreau, a sixth generation of his family, I knew as little about him as he did me. 

In place of the silvery, mustachioed antique of my imagination was a rather more upright figure in his 20s. Perched on the Savoy Hotel foyer’s armchair, this Cointreau is the brand’s heritage and its future. 

Right now he is the youngest of the clan working for the business. You would have thought a few more of his 14 cousins would have joined the company, but the theory of nominative determinism has been dealt an almighty blow in this corner of western France. The sixth-generation Cointreaus are just as likely to practice medicine, work in nuclear power or renovate property as they are to macerate oranges.

But not Alfred. As brand heritage manager, he puts his face to the famous name. “The role was created for me,” he says. “My office is the world – I am away about 50% of the time. To be on the ground, to meet people, to share things kicks your ass out of bed every morning. Last week I was in the US, yesterday I was in Berlin and today London. Next week Finland.”

Cointreau’s visit to Helsinki will see him do a shift behind a pop-up bar. For most brand figureheads, making cocktails behind a bar is fraught with the potential for humiliation. But Cointreau will be at home behind the bar, and not just because it is named Alfred. 

“I worked at the Buddha Bar in Paris as part of my training and I grew up making drinks in Angers, my family home in the Loire Valley,” he says. 

“Every summer we would spend two weeks on the seaside at my grandmother’s house. Before lunch and dinner we would try a new cocktail. So at the end of the two weeks we would know 13 new recipes. My grandmother is the mixologist of the family – she has a piano bar and taught us how to mix drinks and about shakers and strainers.”

Angers is where the Cointreau story started. Since the 16th century the family was made up of bakers and confectioners but, by the 1850s, armed with their skills in maceration, they created the first triple sec (which means triple concentrated and dry). But the famous liqueur would be known by a different name entirely had the French authorities not had their way. Originally the Cointreaus tried to patent Triple Sec. 

In the years that followed, the brand proliferated, but for different reasons. In its native France it made its name as a digestif, but in the US Cointreau became an essential ingredient of the Margarita, the Sidecar (a Prohibition cocktail which used Cointreau, illegally imported at the time) and latterly the Cosmopolitan. In Belgium, Germany and the UK the brand gained notoriety as a drier style of the popular orange liqueur.

But now in 2014, with liqueurs not perhaps in their pomp, it is up to Alfred Cointreau to modernise and explore the cocktail opportunity. Apparently 350 original recipes have Cointreau as an ingredient so, unlike, many liqueurs the brand has a sound footing in the cocktail world. 

Cointreau compares the journey of the cocktail bar to that of the kitchen. “The bar is a little later in its development but we have a lot of good people and there are bar communities growing in many countries around the world,” he says. 

“Each country has its own cocktail culture. We are only at the beginning. Today it is vintage cocktails – which is good – but I think we can go further and be more modern.” 

Cointreau’s crusade is not only to make the family Triple Sec the go-to orange liqueur in bars, but to help “demystify cocktails” for the average consumer. This requires a lot of travel, shows, education and training, a schedule of work he concedes he won’t want forever. “I am 28 and I do not have children yet but you cannot do this job all your life. Maybe later I will concentrate on one region, not the world.”

Young, bright and grounded, it is likely this Cointreau will achieve great things. He has an understated turn of phrase but doesn’t shy away from subjects. “I would love to take care of Cointreau,” he says. “If I do very well, I would like to take care of some of the other brands in the group too.” 

Cointreau is a careful talker so understanding the degree of his ambition takes a degree of reading between the lines. Could we be looking at a one-day leader of the group? Who knows, but with neither the Cointreaus nor the Dubreuil family of Rémy Martin, at the apex of the Rémy Cointreau group currently, it’s not beyond possibility that one day, there will be a clamour to take leadership back in-family. 

Certainly, Cointreau concedes he will need to climb the pay scale if he is to build on his classic car collection – his love outside of the family business. “In the family we love old cars and motorcycles - but they have to be older than us. It’s the family philosophy. In Paris I drive a Vespa that is from 1984 – I was born in 1986. I also have a Lotus Seven from 1959 but my dream car is a Ferrari F40.”

The interest in cars comes from his father, a mechanic who looked after the Cointreau delivery trucks. “If I leave one day it will be to work on vintage cars,” says Cointreau, but, as he says, somehow we both know this won’t happen. This is a family man who enjoys his name, what it means and how to wear it. “When I go through customs it’s really fun to explain that the name on the bottle is the name on the passport. It’s nice to have the responsibility of the name.”

Cointreau was born in Angers, but only because his father made sure of it. Just days before Cointreau’s mother gave birth, she was driven to the city in the west of France to give birth. 

There is no appellation for triple sec, but if there was, Alfred would have been born into it – and its ways. He is Monsieur Cointreau and will help to lead the brand forward at least until the seventh generation is ready to make its entrance. 

Cointreau lets it slip that the seventh generation could arrive sooner than people think, having heard the news himself just the day before. He didn’t say, but in less than nine months, he will no doubt be driving his wife home to Angers.