Cachaça

Muddle the wedges with sugar, then pour. Three ingredients and no room to hide.

White cane sugar, muddled not dissolved, so the grit keeps releasing lime oil.

A regional spirit meeting a regional fruit; muddled it works exactly like a caipirinha lime.

A regional spirit and a regional fruit; muddled it drinks like a sharper caipirinha.

Muddled whole, skin and stone left in briefly for colour, a regional swap for the caipirinha lime.

A regional spirit against a delicate floral fruit, muddled gently rather than crushed hard.

The regional caipirinha swap for lime, sharper and more perfumed once muddled.

A regional spirit against a fruit mild enough not to fight it; more fruit than sour in the glass.

The spirit and the juice it came from. One is the field, the other is the still.

Hard tropical acid does the lime job and brings perfume the lime cannot.

Rounder than lime and less bitter with it. A softer caipirinha, and a legal one.

Cane against cane sugar: the fruit tastes like it was grown for this glass.

Muddled whole, it makes a sharper, more perfumed caipirinha than lime ever does.

Muddled whole, the jelly segments give the spirit a floral edge that lime alone does not.

A sip alongside the fire-roasted shells is the actual regional habit, not a stretch.

Brazil pours both into a blender. The fat rounds the raw edge off the spirit.

Caju juice and cachaca is the north-eastern caipirinha nobody exports.

Two heats, one volatile and one alcoholic. They arrive a half-second apart.

Fat mutes the grassy bite and the drink stops tasting like a dare.

The pulp is sometimes steeped straight into the spirit, the fat carrying the musk into every sip.

Steeped whole, the resin comes through in the spirit the way citrus peel would elsewhere.

Warm bark over green cane. Winter Brazil, poured hot, and rarely written down.

Bitter roast against raw sugar spirit. The pairing every Brazilian bar makes at 2am.

Steep the nibs in the bottle. Bitterness and crunch turn a cheap spirit strange.

The Amazon stimulant against the southern depressant. Brazil in one glass, badly behaved.