CigarsLover Magazine I 2023

SPIRITS
Caipirinha
“Se a vida lhe der um limão,
faça dele uma caipirinha.”
by Davide Pertino
Our journey among the most iconic cocktails ever
stops in South America, in Brazil. A country where
cheerfulness and the wit to improve situations
are common characteristics of Brazilians.
The drink in these lines, the caipirinha, is also a fervent
example of this. It is enough to know that an ancient Brazilian
proverb reads, "If life gives you a lemon, make a caipirinha",
to underline how much the philosophy of "never
giving up" has been rooted in these people since time immemorial.
To research information of a historical nature
on the caipirinha, which is sometimes superimposable
and parallel to the cachaça, it is necessary to leap back
almost five hundred years. We are in Brazil, around 1532,
the year of the beginning of the colonization by the Portuguese
and, with it, the diffusion of sugar cane cultivation.
Like any other colonization, the people who suffered it
were enslaved and exploited for the economic purposes of
the dominating nation. Soon the peaceful Brazilians found
themselves being enlisted as laborers, exploited daily for
a minimal meal and waste from sugar production, mostly
molasses, exhausted and undrinkable on its own. The
Brazilian farmers, however, from this waste obtained an
unfermented sugar cane juice, the garapa. The drink, not
very pleasant if drunk alone, was enriched with garlic, honey,
and lime, to become a tonic for exhausting days or,
when needed, a powerful medicine to heal flu, sore throat,
cough, and cold. A similar story to that of some other
cocktails, we might argue.
The garapa, therefore, is the ancestor of the famous cachaça,
and was also the classic home distillate of the pe-
70 #1-2023 CigarsLover Magazine