Bamboo

Building cocktails gives the bartender—including those who ply their trade at home—endless opportunities to experiment with spirits, modifiers and mixers. Full-proof liquors like whiskey, gin, vodka, tequila, rum and brandy get most of the love, providing the base for classic and modern drinks. But your cocktails don’t always require such a boozy backbone; you can make lower-proof ingredients like vermouth and sherry the star of the show.

Sherry cocktails in particular have seen a lot of interest over the past few years, with the bartender community gravitating toward the underrated fortified wine, mixing together classics like the Sherry Cobbler and Bamboo. The latter is a 19th-century cocktail that is as easy to drink as it is to assemble—stir everything with ice, strain it all into a coupe, and garnish with a lemon twist.

The Bamboo calls for equal measures of dry vermouth and dry sherry, plus a couple dashes of bitters. Fino sherry is a popular choice for the drink, so that’s a great place to start. It’s light and delicate, often with notes of almonds, and it pairs wonderfully with food. Merge it with dry vermouth, and the combination of the two fortified wines creates a floral, herbal and complex cocktail that you can sip all day long without falling off your barstool.

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