Caipiroska
Brazil, with the wrong bottle
- Method
- Built
- Style
- Tropical
- Glass
- Rocks glass
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 60mlVodka
- —Fresh Lime1 lime, cut into 8
- —Demerara Sugar2 tsp
No Demerara Sugar? Demerara Syrup — the same sugar, already dissolved — adds thickness and weight to the drink
- Garnish
- Lime wedge
Make it well
Built, properly.
Cut the lime into eight wedges and drop them into a rocks glass. Cut out the white core running through the middle first if you can be bothered, it's the bitter bit.
Add the sugar and . Press, don't pulverise. You want the juice and the oil out of the peel, not shredded lime pith in your teeth.
Fill the glass with .
Add the vodka and it up from the bottom until the outside of the glass frosts.
Top with a little more crushed ice and add a lime wedge.
On the palate
On the nose it's lime peel, almost entirely, because muddling the skins puts the oil right at the top of the glass. On tasting it's sharp and grassy first, then the demerara arrives late with a bit of toffee that white sugar wouldn't give you. The vodka does very little talking, which is the job here, it's carrying lime rather than competing with it. It keeps changing as the crushed ice goes, so the last third is a different and gentler drink than the first. You'll find undissolved sugar at the bottom. That's not a mistake, that's the drink.
Where it came from
The Caipiroska is a Caipirinha made with vodka instead of cachaça, so the history you want is really the Caipirinha's, and that history is a fight between two countries. The Brazilian version puts it in the sugarcane country of São Paulo state around 1918, where cachaça was mixed with lime, garlic and honey as a Spanish flu remedy. The Portuguese version puts the same idea in the Alentejo in the same year, with doctors prescribing lemon, garlic and honey in spirit for the same pandemic. Both stories agree on what happened next: somebody dropped the garlic, somebody swapped honey for sugar, somebody added ice, and what was left was worth drinking on purpose. The name is the giveaway. Caipira means a country person, someone from the interior, roughly what an English speaker means by a yokel. Caipirinha is the affectionate diminutive of that. It is a drink named "little hick", which tells you how seriously anyone took it at the start.
Keep pouring
If you like the Caipiroska, try these
The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.