Caipirinha
Brazil's happy hour
Muddled lime and sugar tame the funky, grassy bite of cachaça into a bracingly fresh, rustic crusher. Brazil's national cocktail earns its title.
Ingredients
Method
Place lime wedges and sugar into an old-fashioned glass. Muddle gently. Fill the glass with ice cubes. Pour cachaça over and stir.
A Brazilian cachaça drink with no single documented inventor. Its best-known origin story — promoted by the Instituto Brasileiro da Cachaça (IBRAC) — traces it to a 1918 Spanish-flu folk remedy of cachaça, lime, honey, and garlic in inland São Paulo, from which garlic and honey were later dropped (honey giving way to sugar). That dating is contested: other accounts hold the lime-and-cachaça mix was already popular in São Paulo taverns before 1918, and an 1856 municipal record from Paraty documents aguardente with water, sugar, and lime taken against cholera. Per Mixology News (Dirley Fernandes, 2023) and Tenho Mais Discos Que Amigos (Felipe Ernani, 2020), both surveying the competing narratives; IBA Contemporary Classics list. Notes: the 1918/remedy story is popular but one of several; no inventor is securely documented.