Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week’s Cocktail, The Caipirinha!

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. Before we get to the DNC and the end of summer drinking season (boo), I wanted to go over one last rum cocktail. Well, not “rum” exactly, more like rum’s crotchety old uncle. Cachaça, the country cousin of rum, takes some getting used to. But if you approach it with a blue-collar attitude, you can get an earthy, grassy daiquiri that’s like nothing else. Let’s make up Brazil’s drink of choice, the Caipirinha. Here’s the recipe:

2 oz 51 Cachaça

2 tsp sugar

4 thick lime slices, 2 cut from the ends of the lime

3-4 shakes orange bitters

Dash of salt

Club soda

Place the lime slices in your glass. The slices from the ends of the lime should be placed cut side up. Add sugar, salt, and bitters. Muddle vigorously — some lime pulp in the glass is ideal. Stir until the sugar and salt are mostly dissolved. Add ice and cachaça. Top with soda water. 

So, real talk: I know there are some cachaça fans out there among the Wonketariat. It comes up every time I make a rum cocktail. I hate to be cruel, but cachaça is not rum. It’s found in the rum section of the liquor store, but rum is made with sugar or molasses. Cachaça’s made with raw sugarcane juice. It’s a subtle distinction on paper, but the difference in taste is profound. Cachaça is vegetal, grassy, and earthy. It also kicks like a mule. Rum is smoother, less pronounced in flavor, and generally a more approachable spirit. I adore toasty, caramelized aged rum. Cachaça is a tough-love sort of liquor that takes some getting used to. But if you aren’t afraid to be aggressive with it, this spirit will show you its charms.

There are better cachaças out there than 51, but it’s the best-selling one in Brazil. I’ve tasted pricier bottles of the stuff, and I can’t say that I find much difference. Something like Leblon intensifies the grassiness and funkiness of cachaça, but there’s only so much of that I can take. 51 is a bit more muted and balanced, assuming you can get past the diesel-like ethanol blast you get at the first taste of the stuff. That’s not a deal-breaker in my book. Many, many cocktail recipes were written to hide the burn of stiff booze. This variation of the daiquiri is all about taming the monster in the bottle. 

Remember that careful, measured, precise take on the daiquiri I wrote about a while back? Yeah, well, that’s not the place for this. This daiquiri variant is all about attitude. Muddle those lime slices like you mean it — you need to extract the lime oil from the peel as well as some juice, and if you end up with fruit pulp in the drink so much the better. Simple syrup? Nah. just stir some sugar with the lime juice and bitters. It’ll all work out. A pure caipirinha is just sugar, lime, and booze, but I tossed in some orange bitters for a little complexity, some salt to boost the flavor, and some club soda to kill the burn. Cachaça is a rough beast. You need to show it you’re the boss. 

Let’s talk ingredients:

51 Cachaça: If you can’t find cachaça, a solid Jamaican rum like Wray and Nephew will fill the bill. If the whole idea of drinking something this funky and grassy doesn’t appeal, cheap vodka or unaged rum will do fine. I picked up some Captain Morgan White recently to see what the Captain tastes like without sugar, artificial spice, and caramel color. (“Bad” — the answer is “bad.”) Back-shelf booze like this will be at home in this drink. 

Sugar: Occasionally you’ll find cocktail recipes asking for “superfine sugar.” I’ve never found such a thing on the shelves at the hometown grocery. Nominally, you can make it by running regular sugar through a food processor. In reality, just use plain white sugar and stir a bit more. Superfine sugar isn’t as coarse as normal sugar, but it’s the same stuff.

Orange Bitters: I like the extra citrus notes here, and the bitters control the sugar. 

Salt: A very small touch of salt in a cocktail can bring out flavors in a liquor that normally get buried under the alcohol. I keep some saline in my cocktail kit for more elegant drinks, but in this case just dash in some salt from the shaker.

Club Soda: Club soda has a little salt in it, which is why I prefer it in this drink. Use seltzer if you’d prefer. Some grapefruit soda like Squirt would make this drink resemble a Wray & Ting, which is another great funky rum drink.  

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