Cocktail · Medium strength
Caipirinha
Cachaça, lime, sugar, muddled to order — Brazil's national handshake.
How to order it: Whole lime wedges, demerara, short glass. Strong enough to teach you Portuguese.
Flavor profile
The recipe
- 2 oz cachaça
- ½ lime, cut and muddled
- 2 tsp demerara sugar
- Build in the glass with ice
- Short glass; stir well
The story
Brazil's national cocktail is built on cachaça, the sugarcane spirit Brazilians have distilled since the colonial era, centuries before rum had a marketing department. The Caipirinha's exact origin is contested; one popular account traces it to the São Paulo countryside in the early twentieth century, where a folk remedy of lime, garlic, and honey for the Spanish flu allegedly lost its medicinal parts and kept the cachaça. The name derives from caipira, roughly "country person." Whatever the truth, it became the drink of beaches, kiosks, and World Cup summers, and Brazilian law now defines it precisely. It endures because muddled lime and sugar flatter cachaça like nothing else.
Classic variation
The Caipirinha is a riff on a classic. Meet the original:
Adjacent pours