Cachaça is well known to yuppies and lushes all over the world – especially those with weakness for caipirinha. It’s a pretty strong alcoholic liquor made from fermented sugarcane and is the most popoular distilled alcoholic drink in Brazil. It’s known by a host of names, for example, aguardiente, caninha or pinga. What you may or may not have known, is that there are 2 kinds cachaça: artisanal and industrial. The artisanal cachaças are produced by thousands of small mills found throughout the country – traditionally, the fermentation agent is fubá (maize flour) and the distillation unit is a copper pot still. There are 3

phases known as heads, hearts and tails but most of the producers use only the hearts (the other 2 have unpleasant qualities). Once the cachaça has been made, it’s bottled or stored in wooden barrels (made from local or exotic trees) for aging purposes. There are 2 kinds of cachaça – aged (gold) or ordinary (white), the latter is cheaper and is bottled right after production whilst the former, the darker gold is drunk neat because it has been aged with the taste depending on which wood was used for making the barrel.

Ingredients

• Limes
• 3 tbsp coarse sugar
• Cachaça to taste
• Crushed ice

Method

• Caipirinha is a summer drink usually enjoyed before dinner, volumes are . Before starting make sure that you rinse and dry the limes well.
• Decorate the glass with a slice of lime
• Remove a swirl of the rind and the pith by having the limes with a knife and cutting a v groove to remove the centre pith from each half before cutting the lime into small pieces (slice lime in half and cut into about 8 pieces).
• You’ll have to put about ½ of the lime (depending on it’s size and quality) pieces in a short wide glass (you’re going to have to mash the lime with the sugar so a longer glass will be unsuitable).
• Add 3 tsp of coarse sugar (you need to use 1 tsp of the coarse sugar to the limes so that you can grind them) and if you prefer, you could use 2 tsp ordinary granular here since it’s mainly for sweetening.
• Pulverise and mash the limes and then grind and muddle the whole lot with the sugar in the glass with a mashing stick.
• Crush your ice in plastic bag with a hammer or whatever you have or use a ice crusher if you have one before adding the ice into the glass.
• If you have a sweet tooth, add a little more coarse sugar to the glass and finally pour about 50 ml of cachaça over the ice (the volume of alcohol really depends on you)