Sterling

Found deep in the basement of the Stock Exchange Hotel, Sterling is quietly making some of the very best cocktails in Manchester. Head through the lobby and down the spiral staircase, you’ll find the vault, the huge door of which once held the masses of currency which would prop up the trading on the floor upstairs, back when Manchester had its own stock exchange. The bar was established by Daniel and Joe Schofield and James Brandwood in 2022. Daniel and Joe are the award-winning sibling pair behind Schofield’s Bar off Deansgate, which, when it opened in 2021, quickly recalibrated the city’s cocktail scene, providing a grown-up location for grown-up drinks.

It clearly impressed the hotel’s owner, former United icon Gary Neville, who drafted the brothers in to create another world class cocktail bar in his basement. All wood and leather, you could get lost in its darker corners, as you could with its menu, which, like Schofield’s Bar, errs far more comfortably towards the classic than the experimental, as any great hotel bar probably should.

If you want a truly great Martini, a deep and enveloping Manhattan or a zingy Sidecar, you’ve absolutely come to the right place, though its wine selection is also something to behold too, including as it does the bar’s own label champagne. The menu encompasses everything from classy fizz to ‘moonshine’ and ‘bootlegs’, for a more invigorating experience, taking in out-there rums, bitter amaros and musky bourbons, not to mention a dizzying array of straight spirits from around the world.