Sweet Jesu in a Birch-Bark Canoe, the Caipirinha (Kai-pur-een-ya) is a drink that demands respect.  

Forged from an unholy alliance of limes, sugar and poorly-refined automobile propellant, this Brazilian classic will deprive you of a variety of senses and a measurable quantity of your cognitive capacity.  Good news, you will be unlikely to come down with a case of scurvy after one of these, so you’ve got that going for you.

The main culprit in this cocktail is cachaça, a traditional Brazilian beverage that, like most clear distilled liquors, comes in a variety of strengths ranging from “smooth” to “sort of smooth” to “don’t get it on that paint” to “industrial solvent”.  Choose your poison.

If the Manhattan gives you a sense of what severe tire damage feels like, the Caipirinha introduces you to Mr. Great Big Sumo Guy.  As he’s falling from a third story window.  On you.

A recipe for this monster looks something like this:

Take an Asian Lime, cut it in half, cut out the core and slice it into four segments. These aren’t the round ball limes you see at the check-out line at Binny’s.  These look more like lemons.  Make sure to cut off the ends.

1 teaspoon of demerara sugar

3 nuggets of crystalized ginger

2+ ounces of cachaça

Ice

Place the lime slices in a thick-bottomed glass.  Sprinkle the sugar on it, and drop in the crystallized ginger.  Muddle the heck out of it.  Really, just wail away at this until you’ve got a barely-recognizable organic paste.  Aim for “can’t quite tell if there’s sugar in there”.

Fill the glass with ice, right up to the top.  Fill the ice-filled glass with cachaça. Pour into a cocktail shaker and shake, shake, shake, senora, shake it all the time. Decant back into the glass, make sure you don’t have to drive anywhere, say goodbye to your loved ones, and “enjoy”.

The people at Leblon have prepared a nice tutorial on how to make one of these devils, but it won’t taste as good as the one I’ve described for you here.  The crystallized ginger delivers an additional flavor note that I really enjoyed, in addition to an end-of-drink challenge to see if I could find the wee little ginger bit buried at the bottom of the glass. 

I’ve tried this with a variety of cachachas, and I’m enjoying Leblon right now.  I think.