Bamboo

Dry sherry and vermouth with bitters — Louis Eppinger's 1890 Yokohama cocktail, documented in 1900, anticipated the modern low-ABV movement by over a century.

The Bamboo is documented as one of the earliest examples of a low-ABV cocktail designed for sophisticated palates — a pre-dinner drink built from sherry and vermouth rather than distilled spirit, whose elegance and restraint prefigured the modern low-ABV cocktail movement by over a century. The drink was created around 1890 by Louis Eppinger, an American bartender who had emigrated to Japan and was working at the Grand Hotel in Yokohama — one of the most cosmopolitan establishments in the treaty port city that served as Japan's primary gateway for Western commerce and culture following the 1858 Harris Treaty that opened Japan to international trade. Eppinger served a clientele of international merchants, diplomats, and travelers for whom an elegant pre-dinner wine-based drink would have been appealing as an alternative to more assertive spirit cocktails. The formula — dry sherry, dry vermouth, and bitters — appeared in Harry Johnson's revised Bartenders' Manual (1900). The Bamboo's rediscovery by the contemporary craft cocktail movement in the 2010s coincided with the broader low-ABV cocktail trend, and it is now regarded as one of the most elegantly structured sherry cocktails in the historical canon, a model for mixing with fortified wines.