The Caipirinha

We’re getting excited here in the middle of the country - football is here, tomatoes are backyard-garden fresh and a couple times a day you catch that breeze that just starts to smell like fall.

But I’m still holding on to my summer cocktail: The Caipirinha.

It’s not a summer-only drink, though I had many of them on a crowded, all-inclusive beach in Mexico this year. It was felt like a true drink then, after too many Rum Runners and "Coco Locos." Like anything with lots of citrus, sugar and ice, the Caipirinha calls sun and heat to mind. But don’t lump this cocktail in with the standard summery counterparts, your margaritas, your mojitos.

While those drinks are best known for their prominent liquors and shiny garnishes, the Caipirinha is made with a strong muddle, out of which comes the strangely familiar, not too sweet, a little bit earthy taste of a sugar cane alcohol, cachaça.

Both the drink and its star liquor are Brazilian. The Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail, but cachaça was created by Portuguese settlers in the 16th century, reserved as a liquor for the slaves and lower classes.

The name itself is a diminutive version of the word “Caipira,” a Portuguese term for someone from the countryside -– almost the exact equivalent, says Wikipedia, of the American “hillbilly.”

Now, of course, it’s Brazil’s trendy new export, with good cachaça brands making their way into American bars. The Brazilian government’s even tried to capitalize on the rise of the former peasant drink, writing presidential decrees and fighting with the WTO to trademark cachaça and distinguish it from rum.

The last Caipirinha I had was far after vacation, in a bar just blocks away from my downtown Cincinnati apartment and made by a bartender/law student named Brad. He made the first one well, with an entire lime crushed into the small glass and the sugar mostly, but not entirely, dissolved in the bottom.

Brad also tried to serve us the “Brad Caipirinha” which he promised free if we didn’t like it. His version substituted raspberry vodka for the cachaça, which–sorry, Brad—confused the blend with its call for fruity attention.

But the failed cocktail highlighted what makes a good Caipirinha for me: A new liquor and dependable garnishes muddled to the point of delicious ambiguity, simple ingredients creating a drink just beyond the familiar.

THE CAIPIRINHA

1 2/3 oz. cachaça
1/2 fresh lime cut into 4 wedges
2 tsp. white cane sugar

place lime and sugar in an old fashioned glass and muddle
fill glass with crushed ice and add the cachaça
garnish with lime