The Wall Street Journal-20080202-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Food - Drink -- How-s Your Drink- The Cocktail of Carnaval
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With Lent approaching, it's time for various premortification bacchanals to gear up. While New Orleans is in Mardi Gras mode, in Rio de Janeiro the samba schools have their sequins and feathers out for Carnaval. Fueling the festivities in Brazil will be an abundance of alcohol, much of it in the form of the country's national cocktail, the Caipirinha, made with the country's distinctive variety of rum, cachaca.
Brazil has been awash in cachaca for centuries, but until about 10 years ago it exported very little. In the past decade, cachaca has finally cultivated an international following thanks to the popularity of Caipirinhas (or "Caipis," as they are known in Berlin, where the craze is most crazed). Rum connoisseur Wayne Curtis includes a Caipirinha recipe in his 2006 book, "And a Bottle of Rum" -- but only grudgingly. He explains that the drink is "made with cachaca, a rough- edged Brazilian sugarcane liquor that's inexplicably coming into vogue in the United States." David Wondrich, in his "Esquire Drinks" book, says that cachaca "looks like vodka and tastes like it was aged in old truck tires," though he allows that when mixed with lime, sugar and ice to make a Caipirinha, it "doesn't taste half bad."
Cachaca disdain is nothing new. English explorer Richard F. Burton said that European expats in Brazil rarely fell into the sort of drunkenness so common to colonials. "Brandy and gin are hardly obtainable," he wrote, "and the bouquet of the fatal cachaca deters many from the danger." George R. Witte, an American missionary along the Amazon, expressed his despair at "the shockingly low state of morality among Brazilians," for which he blamed the cane liquor. "The vilest sort of homemade rum, known as caxaca, is found everywhere, even if there is not another thing to be had," Witte wrote in the December 1900 issue of The Missionary Review of the World (not exactly a publication one could expect to be friendly toward local hooch).
The American who drinks cachaca "may be definitely catalogued as well ahead on the broad way which leadeth to destruction," wrote the author of the Captain Kettle stories, C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne. "I have met him, and he was." One of the first Americans of any prominence to sample cachaca was none other than Donald Duck. Disney sent Donald south in 1943 for the film "Saludos Amigos" (part of the "Good Neighbor Policy" of love-bombing South America to keep it free from Axis influence). The dapper parrot Jose Carioca takes him to a cafe, where the cachaca knocks Donald's sailor-cap off.
"There are many different qualities of cachaca," Edward Randolph Emerson wrote in "Beverages, Past and Present," his 1908 history of the world's liquors. He said that "while the good is, as in the nursery rhyme, very good indeed, the bad, to put it mildly, is horrid." Distilling fermented sugar-cane juice has long been a robust and decentralized industry in Brazil. With thousands of distilleries making cachaca, it's no wonder that the country has been able to ramp up its fuel ethanol industry so quickly. Though the rap on cachaca has long been that the firewater is itself redolent of gasoline.
While a few mainstream cachacas are now available on U.S. shelves, such as Cachaca 51 and Pitu, the splashy product launches have been for cachacas angling for the upscale market. But given the liquor's longstanding reputation as a rustic firewater, some companies have balked at using the name "cachaca." Diageo calls its Oronoco brand "rum made with fresh cut Brazilian mountain cane"; Agua Luca, imported by Kentucky's Heaven Hill, is also presented primarily as a rum. But others are betting they can define cachaca as a luxury product, including Cabana Cachaca and Leblon.
Once you've got your cachaca -- or Brazilian sugarcane rum -- here's how the Caipirinha is made. Lop the ends off a lime and then cut it in half. Slice one of the halves into four pieces, and remove the white core while you're at it. Put the lime in a sturdy glass and add a couple of teaspoons of sugar (preferably the coarse, unbleached sort). Mash the sugar and lime with a muddler, but not too hard, as the skin of the lime has a bitter oil best left unextracted. Add cachaca and crushed ice and stir.
In Brazil, though the basic Caipirinha is made with lime, it is common to substitute other fruit. Luanda Alonso of the cultural affairs office at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington explains that when strawberries are in season, one will smush up a glass full of that fruit and sugar until the strawberries have a soupy consistency. Add cachaca, crushed ice and stir -- and you have a Strawberry Caipirinha. There are Tangerine Caipirinhas and Kiwi Caipirinhas. In Brazil's north, Caipirinhas are often made with star fruit or the faux-apples of the cashew tree. Occasionally, more than one type of fruit goes in the glass -- Strawberry-Pineapple Caipirinhas are not unknown. But such sweet fruits are not generally mixed with tart limes.
These variations are not to be confused with Brazil's other common cachaca quaff, the Batida, a fruit-smoothie sort of drink. A Strawberry Batida would be made by tossing strawberries and sugar into a blender with a little condensed milk and ice. A Coconut Batida is Brazil's answer to the Pina Colada.
Richard F. Burton warned that those who take to cachaca too enthusiastically "may reckon on delirium tremens and an early grave." But he did allow that if one could manage to enjoy it in moderation, cachaca would do one more good than harm. Brazilians were as loud in their praise of cachaca then as they are proud of their national spirit today: They declared "that it cools the heat, heats the cold, dries the wet and wets the dry," Burton wrote. "When did man ever want a pretext for a dram?"
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Caipirinha
1/2 lime, quartered
2 tsp sugar
2 oz cachaca
crushed ice
-- Muddle sugar and lime wedges in the bottom of a sturdy, short, flat-bottomed glass. But don't crush too vigorously, or the lime-peel will release overly bitter oils. Add cachaca and crushed ice, and stir.
