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The Official Cocktail of Rio: the Caipirinha
To celebrate the start of the Summer Olympics, I’ll be enjoying something far better than the Summer Olympics — booze. Specifically, I will be drinking the official cocktail of Brazil, the Caipirinha. It’s a straightforward lime, sugar, and hootch concoction that’s the perfect way to slake your thirst on a hot summer day, whether you’re lounging on Ipanema or sitting your front porch (consult your local liquor laws).
The drink’s name is the Portuguese equivalent of “hillbilly” — caipira refers to the countryside where Brazilian sugar plantations distilled their localized version of rum. But first, a warning about this “rum”: It’s called cachaça, which I can only assume is Portuguese slang for “rocket fuel.” It offers the bouquet of turpentine and the finish of hull cleaner. Needless to say, you don’t want to do shots of this stuff unless you need to clean out those stubborn intestinal parasites you picked up along the Amazon.
However, when cachaça is combined with sugar and lime, the harshness vanishes and it’s pure refreshment. Here’s how you make a Caipirinha:
- Cut half a lime into 2-4 pieces, and toss them into a sturdy glass.
- Sprinkle in 2 tsp. of sugar (I add a bit more) and muddle it. (Muddling usually calls for a special tool, but a wooden spoon will do fine. Muddling is just beating up the lime wedges a bit to release some of the juice and the oils from the rind, while mixing in the sugar.)
- Fill the glass with crushed ice, pour in 2 oz. of cachaça, and stir it up.
Easy, right? Even easier is the drinking since it’s the perfect mix of sweet and sour with no boozy bite. This is the beauty of the Caipirinha, but also the danger. If you aren’t limiting yourself to two or three of these babies, you just won’t stop. By Monday morning, you’ll wake up face down in a favela, wondering who gave you the throat tattoo of a samba dancer and searching in vain for your underpants.
So while you’re watching the events in Rio this weekend, and need to tune out a preachy Bob Costas monologue, do it with a Caipirinha in hand. I’ll make mine a double.
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