Caipirinha is the essence of Brazil: samba, sea breezes and scents of the tropics in a cocktail glass. The recipe seems simple, with only four ingredients: lime, sugar, ice, and cachaça. But ordering a caipirinha anywhere outside Brazil often results in disappointment, because the process of making the drink is the secret to success.

Cachaça, the key ingredient in the caipirinha, begins with sugar. Production of cachaça began in the 1500s in Brazil, when plantation owners began to plant sugar cane. The Portuguese first grew sugar cane on Madeira, but the steep volcanic hillsides of this island off the coast of Africa meant limited arable land was available for the crop.

Vast amounts of land in Portugal’s colony of Brazil, and the enslavement of staggering numbers of human beings kidnapped from Africa and forced to work the plantations, made massive production of sugar possible in Brazil. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, more than four million enslaved people disembarked in ports in Brazil, compared with 560,000 in the United States.

The origin of the liquor is lost to history, but it is speculated that enslaved people invented cachaça. Perhaps originally created for medicinal purposes, cachaça begins with the juice of sugar cane, called caldo de cana. Caldo de cana is sold at roadside booths throughout the Northeast of Brazil. The chilled liquid is sweetness on steroids—I tried it once and it made my teeth hurt, and not because it was cold.

To make cachaça, sugar cane juice is fermented and then distilled. This differs from rum, which is distilled from molasses, a byproduct of sugar refining. The fermented cane juice is usually distilled in copper vessels, and can be bottled directly, which is called white cachaça. Artisanal cachaça is aged in wooden barrels, called “silver” or “gold” depending on the amount of time aging. Plain old pinga, a slang word for cachaça best translated as “drop” (the noun, as in in rain drop) is usually used to make caipirinha, while the more expensive aged cachaça is best served neat to appreciate its unique flavor. Brazilians may keep a bottle of cachaça in the freezer to serve chilled in a shot glass. Due to its alcohol content—38 to 40% by volume—the liquor doesn’t freeze.

A selection of cachaças at a supermarket in Portugal. The cheapest bottles on the right are white cachaça. Prices in euros.

The next ingredient is sugar itself, and only pure cane sugar should be used. In the US, be sure to check the label on the sugar package, as up to sixty percent of sugar in the United States is made from sugar beets, not sugar cane. Using beet sugar to make a caipirinha would be sacrilege.

And finally, limes. These are not green lemons, as some otherwise reliable web sources suggest. The confusion comes from the terms in Portuguese, which differ between Brazil and Portugal. In Brazil the word limão means lime, the green citrus. In Portugal limão means lemon. Lemon is Brazil is called limão Siciliano, referring to the yellow citrus as Sicilian lime. In Portugal a lime is lima, and a lemon is limão.

With background on the ingredients clarified, we’re ready to go shopping. First, let’s buy a mid-grade cachaça like Velho Barreiro, the one with the red cap in the photo above. Let’s not skimp on the liquor if we’re taking the time to make a really good caipirinha.. Cheaper cachaça can taste a bit like turpentine, and impurities can leave you with a wicked headache. Too many caipirinhas will do the same thing, of course. Velho Barreiro is double distilled and 39% alcohol by volume.

The Velho Barreiro company was started in the 1960s by the Höffer family, in the town of Itapetininga in the interior of São Paulo state. For many years I didn’t look at the name Velho Barreiro carefully and somehow thought it meant old barrel. But barreiro means a type of clay often found on a riverbank. The name actually comes from a type of bird that builds a nest out of mud, joão-de-barro. An ancestor of the Höffers had this kind of bird in his yard, which he named “velho barreiro.” So his descendants used this name for the cachaça. In 1973 they were bought out by another company.

Sales of Velho Barreiro account for more than half the cachaça market in Brazil, and they take their heritage and market share seriously. Here is the somewhat flowery prose from the bottle’s back label:

Velho Barreiro é conhecida em todo o país como uma cachaça pura e autêntica. Desde a apanha da cana, passando pela destilação controlada, até o processo de engarrafamento, todo o cuidado é tomado para produzir a melhor cachaça nacional. Ao colocarmos nas garrafas as aberturas invioláveis, estamos mantendo a essência natural de cana e preservando sua inconfundível qualidade.

Here is my translation:

“Velho Barreiro is known throughout the country as a pure and authentic cachaça. From harvesting the cane, through controlled distillation, to the bottling process, great care is taken to produce the best national cachaça. We put tamper-proof closures on the bottles, maintaining the natural essence of sugarcane and preserving its unmistakable quality.”

Limes and lemons, supermarket in Portugal

Then, after making sure we are buying pure cane sugar, we need to choose our limes. My mother-in-law taught me to choose citrus fruit by feeling its heft in your hand, because the heavier the fruit the more juice it has. You also want to look for a thin rind. As to color, you almost never see yellow limes in supermarkets in the US, but fully ripe limes can be pale yellow.

Choosing a lime by seeing how heavy it is

Now it’s time to make our caipirinha! This is where Jasiel, my caipirinha-master husband takes over the process. First, slice one lime into wedges. And the glass is super important: Jasiel only uses jars from the French jelly Bonne Maman, the ones with the cute red gingham lids. They are the perfect size, and the lid makes shaking the cocktail easy. Plus it’s fun to serve, kind of like iced tea in a Mason jar in the southern US.

Add a soup spoon of sugar (about a tablespoon). You can add more to taste if you prefer, but an overly sweet caipirinha is not as deliciously refreshing. And this is often what’s wrong with the cocktail sold in American bars. Too sweet, and often bottom shelf cachaça.

Now, muddle the limes. Which means to bruise the limes and the sugar to release the flavor. There are of course fancy stainless steel muddlers with a rough surface like a meat mallet on the business end. But Jasiel prefers his wooden muddler, which has a story that makes it a keepsake as well as a required tool.

Several years ago, we had driven a thousand miles from Brasilia to the Northeast state of Ceará, which Brazilian friends said was “courageous,” a nice way of saying they thought we were crazy. The open road in Brazil can indeed be dangerous, but that is a story for another blog. I was using the Quatro Rodas guidebook while Jasiel drove, and I had picked out a hotel on a small beach quite a few miles south from the oceanside capital city, Fortaleza. It was getting dark quickly and the dirt road was rutted but passable. We slowly drove on and on as it got later and later. “Justine, are you sure there’s a hotel out here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.” I insisted there was. We finally saw a light in the distance, and it was the small hotel at Praia das Fontes, a beautiful beach reached from the hotel by wooden steps built over falésias, sand cliffs in eerie shapes and colors.

Falésias at Beberibe, Ceará--by Raphael Fernandes on Unsplash

The beach also has water dripping down from natural springs, or fontes, for which it is named. Once we got set up in our room we went down to the bar for dinner. The bartender made a caipirinha using a wooden muddler. Jasiel asked the bartender where he had gotten the muddler, and the bartender said it was made by a friend of his. So the next day we went to see the guy and Jasiel ordered his own. The muddler was custom-made from wood of the aroeira tree which is native throughout Brazil and Argentina and known for its dense and indestructible timber. So every time Jasiel muddles limes, it brings back memories of that beach.

Add crushed ice:

And now a generous pour of cachaça.

Now put on the lid of the jelly jar and shake! Jasiel taught some of our British friends how to make the cocktail, and they report that doing a little samba while you shake the Bonne Maman jar improves the final product.

And now, the proof is in the sipping.

I have to confess that cachaça doesn’t agree with me, as I prefer a nice white wine instead. But whenever Jasiel makes a caipirinha, our ritual is that he gives me a smell before he sips. That lime, the cachaça—it’s the scent of summer, the fragrance of Brazil.

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