Caipirinha -cocktail

                  Bartending is a career choice for some and a hobby for others. Whichever route you take, there are a few tips, tricks and techniques that you will need to begin making great drinks. Once you learn the basics and become familiar with popular cocktails you can take you new found knowledge to begin creating great spirited concoctions of your own.                                           

                                        All about Caipirinha -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caipirinha

            video how to make caipirinha:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MneZ2lxOFc

  Caipirinha . It is made with cachaça, an intensely sweet Brazillian style of rummade from sugarcane juice. The Caipirinha is the national drink of Brazil, where it originated, and is a common Carnavale drink. Although it is more difficult to find, it's important to choose a premium cachaça for this cocktail in particular because the drink is not heavily flavored and a cheaper brand can ruin an otherwise perfect Caipirinha. 

Prep Time: 3 minutes

Yield: 1 Cocktail

Ingredients:

• 1 lime, quartered
• 2 tsp fine sugar
• 2 oz cachaca

  Preparation:

1.  Place the lime wedges and sugar into an old fashioned glass
2.  Muddle  well.
3. Fill the glass with  crush ice cubes.
4. Pour in the cachaca.
5. Stirr well

 Cachaça  is a liquor made from fermented sugarcane juice.

It is the most popular distilled alcoholic beverage in Brazil. It is also known as aguardente,pinga, caninha and by many other names

Cachaça is mostly produced in Brazil, where, according to 2007 figures, 1.5 billion litres (390 million gallons) are consumed annually, compared with 15 million litres (4.0 million gallons) outside the country. It is typically between 38% and 48% alcohol by volume. When it is homemade it can be as strong as the distiller wants. Up to six grams per litre of sugarmay be added. The major difference between cachaça and rum is that rum is usually made from molasses, a by-product from refineries that boil the cane juice to extract as much sugar crystal as possible, while cachaça is made from fresh sugarcane juice that is fermented and distilled. As some rums are also made by this process, cachaça is also known as Brazilian rum.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the producers of sugar in various European colonies in America started to use the by-products of sugar, molasses and scummings, as the raw material for the alcoholic beverage which in British colonies was named rum, in France's tafia, in Spain's aguardiente de caña and in the Portuguese (Brazil) aguardente da terra, aguardente de cana and later cachaça.

Figures from 2003 indicate 1.3 billion litres of cachaça are produced each year though only 1% of this production is exported (mainly toGermany).Outside Brazil, cachaça is used almost exclusively as an ingredient in tropical drinks, with the caipirinha being the most famous cocktail.

Caipirinha Cocktail Ingredients

•  2 heaping teaspoons brown sugar
•  1 measure cachaca
•  1, cut into six segments lime(s)

Instructions

•  Add the brown sugar to a traditional stout glass, then add the lime segments and crush them to squeeze the juice into the mixture, leaving the pieces in when finished. Fill the glass with crushed ice, and finally add the cachaca, one measure or to taste.
  The trouble you go to for this cocktail is more than worth it, and in fact becomes part of the ritual of what is practically Brazil's national drink!

 

History of Caipirinha

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Kicking off the first in a new Square Meal series looking at the world’s best-loved cocktails, Ben McCormack traces the history of the caipirinha

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First there was the margarita, then the mojito. Now Latin America has given us another hugely popular cocktail: the caipirinha. Its ubiquity has little to do with its hard-to-say name – pronounced ‘kai-purr-een-yuh’ – and everything to do with its ease of preparation and the current trend for all things Brazilian.

OK, so sipping this mix of cachaça, lime and sugar can’t promise to transform your garden barbecue into the Rio carnival or make you look like Giselle, but it is 100 per cent guaranteed to refresh you.

The word caipirinha means ‘little countryside drink’ in Portuguese. Although there’s no definitive version of how the cocktail was invented, its story is bound up with that of cachaça, the spirit that Brazilians drink a staggering 200 million
litres of every year.

It seems likely that the caipirinha evolved as workers on Brazil’s sugar cane plantations looked for a palatable way to drink the cachaça they were helping to produce. An alternative story has it that Portuguese slave traders returning to Europe would use limes to prevent scurvy, which they added to the cachaça they’d picked up in Brazil and combined with sugar for sweetness.

Like rum, cachaça is made from sugar cane, but it has a stronger flavour and aroma because its distillation process retains more impurities. Unlike rum, cachaça does not taste particularly good on its own – although aged cachaça sipped over ice is an exception. But it tastes very good indeed when mixed with fruit, be it the limes or cashew fruit native to Brazil or strawberries and blackberries closer to home.

Nothing could be simpler than making a caipirinha: muddle some lime wedges with sugar and add cachaça and crushed ice. But, as is the case with many simple recipes, making a bit of effort will improve the quality. For example, rolling the limes before you cut them will help release their juices and aromatic oils. Most bartenders also prefer
to use granulated sugar rather than sugar syrup: not only does its rough texture help extract more juice and oils from the lime but the melted sugar adds a sweet chewiness to the finished drink.

If you’re too lazy to make a caipirinha yourself, head to one of London’s handful of Brazilian bars. The current leader of the pack is Mocotó, the swish new Knightsbridge bar and restaurant that sells nine caipirinhas based on exotic flavours such as passionfruit and pineapple. For something a little less glitzy, try three-year-old Guanabara in Covent Garden, where the authentic Brazilian flavours in its 12 caipirinhas include the superfood du jour, açaí.

But Guanabara’s general manager, Chris Maxwell, has a few words of advice. ‘The caipirinha is a small drink and the cachaça doesn’t taste very potent when it’s mixed with the other ingredients,’ he says. ‘But it’s pretty strong stuff and customers don’t usually realise this until they’ve had three or four glasses and they’re wobbling all over the place.’

Then again, if this happens to you, you can always pretend you’re practising your latest salsa moves.