A bone-dry, low-proof aperitif of fino sherry and dry vermouth lifted by orange bitters — a wine-based cousin of the Martini, and the dry-vermouth answer to the Adonis. Stirred cold and served up under an expressed orange peel, it drinks nutty, saline and clean, the sherry's briny edge drawn out by the vermouth's herbal snap and a faint citrus perfume from the oils.
Garnish: Orange Peel
Stirred · Coupe · Up
add
Add the fino sherry, dry vermouth, orange bitters, and aromatic bitters to a mixing glass with ice.
stir
Stir until well chilled and lightly diluted.
strain
Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, served up.
express
Express an orange twist over the surface.
garnish
Drop the orange twist into the glass.
The most repeated story credits Louis Eppinger, bartender at the Grand Hotel in Yokohama, with mixing it around 1890, and it is sometimes billed as Japan's first original cocktail. Yet the Bamboo was already in American print by 1886 in the Western Kansas World — three years before Eppinger reached Japan in 1889 — and a "Boston bamboo" turned up in 1893, so its true inventor remains unsettled. Its proportions have shifted over time, from the three-to-one sherry-heavy recipe of 1886 to the equal parts Boothby printed in 1908, the balance most modern bartenders now favour.