Caipirinha

The Caipirinha — Brazil's national cocktail — is made with just three ingredients: cachaça (a Brazilian spirit distilled from fresh sugar cane juice), fresh lime, and sugar. The IBA recipe calls for 5 cl cachaça, half a fresh lime cut into wedges, and 2 teaspoons of granulated sugar, muddle together and served over crushed or cracked ice. The simplicity of the recipe means quality ingredients are essential.

Lime wedges and sugar are muddled directly in an Old Fashioned glass to extract the lime juice and oils from the skin — the skin's oils are essential to the authentic bitter-sweet character. Cachaça is then poured over the muddled mixture and the glass is filled with ice and briefly stirred to combine. The drink is not strained or shaken; it is served with the muddled lime in the glass.

Although both cachaça and rum are made from sugarcane, cachaça is distilled from fresh-pressed sugar cane juice, giving it a grassy, vegetal, and funky character distinct from most rums, which are made from molasses (a byproduct of refined sugar). Brazilian law stipulates that cachaça must be produced in Brazil and aged in wooden barrels made from native Brazilian wood. The fresh-juice basis is the primary reason cachaça cannot be substituted with rum without fundamentally changing the Caipirinha.