There is a way, but a way much more dangerous than the caipirinha itself! I’m pretty sure I wrote a post on the majesty of the caipirinha at some point. If I have time, I’ll go back and look but there’s a god awful amount of posts to comb through. Yes, I still haven’t figured out the categories on this damn WordPress. Ah, here it is. Yeah, this one didn’t really withstand the sands of time so well but hey, I got it done. Some of those posts in 2023 were a serious struggle. Looking back now, I still can’t believe it. No, it wasn’t some monumental task like climbing Everest or saving a life, but for me it was difficult to sit in this goddam chair and get it done on a daily basis. Not only reaching down and trying to find motivation but also coming up with something to actually say and yes, some of those days there wasn’t much to say…

Back to the task at hand. Yeah, this one is a muddler. Yeah, I hate muddling but I think I need to explain that I love the way it tastes, just not the mess it creates during service. We’re not one of those bars with 80 shaking tins and a barback that comes by to clean after I’ve thrown said tins with aggression into my sink during service. We’re a small restaurant bar with seven seats and four tins, three Hawthornes, two spoons, two juleps, two teas, and one Japanese beaker. That said, we get it done and it’s all we need. I wash my own tins, thank you.

We got some really good juice in the form of some delicious small batch mezcal called Granalta from this random dude named Jed Wolf who wears himself a bolo tie and a nice, waxed mustache to accompany, and who walked in one day and said hi and gave us a tasting of many delicious small batch mezcals from the mysterious land of Oaxaca. Some of the stuff he had came from distillations of 50 liters or less. Yeah. He had pictures of himself with all the mezcaleros and their operations, a lot of said operations not involving much technology at all, or in many cases, zero, which is sort of what we’re all about too and why I bought some of said mezcal. Anyway, I think the best thing to do with such good juice, aside from just drinking it straight like nature intended, is to serve it with fresh muddled lime, sugar, and a sprinkle of salt. Maybe even some sal de gusano.

Honor thy ingredients.

Most of the time a bartender is pretty far from the actual ingredient itself. What I mean by this is: 1. The bottles have touched many hands on the way over from who knows where. 2. There’s no relationship with how it’s made. 3. The way it’s made is probably not exactly the most ethical.

We do our best in this way. Bruto Americano instead of Campari. Brovo Orange instead of Cointreau. Yada, yada. But sometimes Green Chartreuse is Green Chartreuse and Hamilton Demerara 87 Rum, well…

I could post an entire book about all of this. But let’s just say many bars, including our own don’t exactly take into account carbon footprint, along with as many organic and local brands as possible. We do our best, but like I said, if we wanted to do something like this our prices would be much, much higher than they already are. I think $18 for a cocktail with seasonal ingredients in it is a pretty good deal. At Rustic we focus more on the fresh, local, organic, seasonal ingredients going into the beverage that the booze going into the beverage which I can safely say is more than 99% of bars.

But, the alcohol is a big part of it and we don’t take the booze into account as much as we could. There’s many reasons behind all of this. The main one being, well, money. Bars have to make money and so you can either have insane prices along with your ethics or you can have some ethics and moderate prices. We choose the latter a lot of the time.

It’s a balancing act. So it gives me great pleasure to receive a truly magnificent ingredient like Granalta and treat it thus. Sugar, lime, booze, ice.

I’m hard pressed to give up my caipirinha recipe because it’s really damn good and it’s the only original thing I’ve got in this cold, cruel world. Ok, here’s a hint: Let’s just say it helps to weigh your limes for consistency. It’s the one thing super annoying about the caipirinha right? Any other daiquiri type drink recipe will tell you .75 oz. of lime juice, whatever, but a caipirinha recipe will say to muddle half a lime. Well, it’s unfortunate, but not all limes are created equal.

What we do know is that muddling fruit, especially citrus fruit, creates a different, better sort of drink. That said, muddling ain’t fun on a Saturday night. But muddling not only puts the freshest of fruits in your potential beverage, it also brings in the citrus oils from the peels. Ah yes, the oils.

The other part of the equation, the ice, is this: Don’t just throw a bunch of crappy ice in there, shake, and then dirty pour it all into a glass. Fluff your muddled lime chunks, sugar, and mez together with a BFR then extract your BFR, add your little rocks, give it all the slightest dance in your tin, and then dirty pour. I can’t hold your hand on this one, there’s going to be some trial and error, but I think with the above information you’ll be able to take your caipirinha game to a higher ground.

Oh, and the name? Well, the original caipirinha comes from the Brazilian Portugese “Caipira” meaning peasant or inhabitant of the bush…Roughly translated in English, a redneck, or hillbilly.