The story goes that everyone in Brazil drinks caipirinhas when it’s oppressively hot. And because Brazil is on the equator, it’s oppressively hot pretty much all the time.
The ingredients for a caipirinha couldn’t be simpler: a lime, sugar, and a couple ounces of a Brazilian alcohol called cachaça, a sort of cousin to white rum. Most rum is made from fermenting molasses, a byproduct of sugar production. Cachaça is made by fermenting unprocessed sugarcane juice. It tastes like a slightly sour, faintly musky rum. That sourness plays extremely well off crushed limes.
Because the caipirinha — which is apparently pronounced “kai·pr·ee·nyuh“ — is so entrenched in Brazilian culture, it has inspired strongly held beliefs and heated disagreements. One of the most strongly argued caipirinha disputes is whether it needs to be made with granulated sugar, as caipirinha purists insist, or if it can be made with sugar syrup, like 95 percent of the sweetened cocktails in the world.
Because of my deep commitment to world peace, I decided to try the two versions side by side.
Here is the classic recipe for a caipirinha:
- 1 lime, sliced into wedges
- 2 teaspoons table sugar
- 2 ounces cachaça – which is apparently pronounced “kuh-shah-sah,” which sounds like an obscure type of martial arts weapon. “This is no ordinary murder, Higgins; this man was killed by a cachaça.”
Muddle the lime wedges and sugar in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. There will be a lot of juice, so don’t smash the limes like you might normally with a muddler. Grind it down hard, for longer than you might normally, but make sure you don’t splash.
Add cachaça and ice, then stir thoroughly with a bar spoon and pour into a rocks glass. Some bartenders suggest garnishing it with a lime wheel, but there is so much lime in this drink already, that seems a bit like overkill.
The theory is that the sugar acts like an abrasive and helps strip citrus oil out of the lime peel. That seems unlikely; logic would suggest that the crushed lime produces so much acidic juice that the sugar is dissolved almost instantly and doesn’t have time to abrade anything. But let’s withhold judgment; sometimes Reality ignores Logic mercilessly.
OK, let’s set this aside and make a second caipirinha, with sugar syrup. Do everything the same, but add two teaspoons of simple syrup at the same time as the cachaça.
Crush, crush, crush, pour, pour, clink, clink, clink. Stir, stir. Pour/clink/gurgle. Let’s take a look at the two caipirinhas side by side.
They both look and smell delicious.
Taking a sip of the caipirinha made with syrup: **Raised eyebrows** This is a very solid cocktail. It’s a little sour and musky from the cachaça, just sweet enough, and a love letter to lime.
That’s going to be tough to beat. Let’s try the classic caipirinha: **Pupils dilate, ceiling opens up, the sound of angels singing fills the kitchen**
I realize that I’m still standing in my kitchen, but for just an instant I was sitting on a patio surrounded by tropical flowers while samba music played in the background.
The caipirinha made with sugar is better by several orders of magnitude. This is the real love letter to lime, written with a fountain pen, using sophisticated metaphors and a complex rhyme scheme. In comparison, the other one was a late-night text, asking, “U up?”
(I drank both versions, by the way; I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.)
I think I’ll open a summer-only pop-up bar called Cai-Piranha.
Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.
