The Caipirinha

The Caipirinha , a mix of cachaça, sugar, ice, and muddled pieces of lime (and often other fruits), is considered by non-Brazilians to be the national drink of that country. See cachaça. In Brazil, however, the Caipirinha is merely the most famous member of a large, native class of mixed drinks, the batidas, which Roberto Costa defined in his pioneering 1974 aperitif and digestive. Indeed, one of the Caipirinha’s original names appears to have been “Batida Paulista”—roughly, “São Paulo Shake.” That was in the 1950s. Before that, it appears to have been identified simply by its most distinctive ingredients, as pinga com limão, “pinga (one of cachaça’s many other names) with lime.”

It is a quirk of Brazilian drinking that this simple, basic way of drinking sugar-cane spirit appears to be of no great antiquity. Where almost all the other Latin American countries where cane was grown had their own, naturalized versions of punch by the eighteenth century, Brazil seems to have by and large ignored the drink. See punch. It is only in the mid-nineteenth century that one begins to find pinga com limão, as in the folksong “O meu boi morreu” (“My ox died”), where it is lauded as a cure for the evil eye, or when, in 1856, the town of Paraty was forced to issue it during a cholera epidemic so that people wouldn’t drink the water, or when, thirty years later, the English traveler James William Wells came across a “a refresco [cooling drink] of cachaça, lemon, sugar, and water” in Paraíba, in the easternmost part of Brazil.

As that “Batida Paulista” implies, however, it was much further south, in São Paulo, that the drink became cemented as an institution, in the first half of the twentieth century. The Batida Paulista, however, showed the influence of American mixology, and not only in its incorporation of ice. Some versions had the sugar added in the form of simple syrup, while others had the “sophisticated” (as the great Brazilian poet Mario de Andrade characterized them in 1944) additions of egg white and a “splash” of gin; this would require mixing in a cocktail shaker. Some drinkers, however, rejected such innovations.

That created a dynamic very much like the one that gave rise to the Old-Fashioned in the United States, with the old pinga com limão playing the ancestral role of Cock-Tail and the Batida Paulista as the evolved Manhattan and its ilk. See Old-Fashioned Cocktail; Cock-Tail; and Manhattan Cocktail. And, as in the United States, there was a third way, one that incorporated the ice from the new drink into a nostalgic, rustic preparation built simply in the glass. In the United States, that was an Old-Fashioned; in Brazil, a “caipirinha,” or (roughly) a “Little Hillbilly” (“Caipira” is a southern Brazilian epithet for a person from the rural hinterlands). The name was in occasional use by the 1950s and widespread by the end of the 1960s. By then, the drink was known throughout Brazil.

It would take another twenty years for the Caipirinha to catch on abroad, at least outside of Brazilian expatriate communities. In the 1980s, it enjoyed a strong vogue in Europe, where it remains popular, and in places that look to Europe for drinking trends. In Kenya, a variation, the Dawa, went so far as to become the national drink. In the United States, however, despite frequent efforts from cachaça importers, it remains a drink more mentioned than served. See Dawa.

Meanwhile, in Brazil the drink was evolving. Fashionable city dwellers found cachaça too rustic and backward-looking for their tastes and preferred vodka, thus making the drink a “Caipiroska,” which first appears in the early 1980s. Others went for imported white rum (for a “Caipirissima”) or replaced the lime with other fruits, such as passionfruit, pineapple, strawberries, grapes, and so forth, at which point it merges back into the general category of batida.

Andrade, Mario de. “Os eufemismos de cachaca.” Hoje (São Paulo), April, 1944.

Costa, Roberto. Traçado geral das batidas. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1974.

Jannuzzi, Felipe. “A história da caipirinha-versão Paratiense.” Mapa da cachaca, January 17, 2014, https://www.mapadacachaca.com.br/artigos/qual-a-origem-da-caipirinha-versao-paratiense/ (accessed February 22, 2021).

Wells, James William. Exploring and Travelling Three Thousand Miles through Brazil. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1887.

By: David Wondrich