Our next door neighbors gifted us with a bottle of Vereda Tropical Cachaça when they came over for dinner a couple of months ago, and it’s still just sitting here because we don’t know how to drink it. I’ve read random drink ideas I found on Google, but I’d rather have some recommendations from the Dope on how to drink it. (I generally prefer recommendations to random internet recipes for anything.)
So… anyone have experience with this stuff?
The most common application would be the Caipirinha. It’s like a mojito without the mint.
Yeah, I wouldn’t make anything except caipirinhas with it, but that’s only because if I had any cachaca I’d make caipirinhas in preference to any other drink on the planet. God I love those things. Use crushed ice.
According to my liquor store guy, a caipirhina is made by pouring a shot of cachaca into a glass and…
Keep adding limes and sugar till it kills the taste.
I happen to like caipirihinas, but cachaca is only a hippity hop step from moonshine.
The standard way to drink cachaça, as noted above, is in a caipirinha. Easy to make: crush lime wedges in a glass or a punch bowl, mix with crushed ice, sugar, and cachaça. No water apart from the ice.
Alternatively, there’s the caipifruta - basically a caipirinha where you substitute a fruit juice for the limes. I like the passion fruit version. The best I’ve had was a little different: cachaça, crushed ice, passion fruit juice concentrate, and condensed milk.
Or you could just drink it straight - I do, on occasion. It’s like non-spiced rum (obviously, since cachaça is basically Brazilian rum), but with a stronger taste. Lots of people don’t like it, though. Like vodka, or Scandinavian akvavit, there’s now a strong, small community that gets fanatical about cachaça-tasting and about finding small breweries with low, handmade production, and about homebrewing.
Well, for the really adventurous, there’s another drink I make on occasion, which I’ll write about even though you almost certainly won’t find the stuff to make it: chimarrão with cachaça. Chimarrão is a tea-like drink made from erva mate, a green herb native to Paraguay. You put the erva in a cuia, which is a cup made from a gourd, until it’s half-full, with the erva against the side. Then you add hot water from a thermos and drink the infusion through a bomba, which is a sort of straw made from steel. For the version I make with cachaça, I simply fill the thermos to about 10-20% with cachaça beforehand; adds to the flavour, sort of like putting a little Irish in your coffee. It’s also a great way of making a decent chimarrão when your only erva is of low quality, which is a problem I had for a little while.
On preview: cachaça basically is moonshine. Just a month or so ago I had some made in a guy’s bathtub, and it was pretty good. It’s where cachaça gets its other popular name from, “pinga” (from the verb “pingar”, “to drip”, as in dripping from the still). Another common name is, of course, “o diabo” - “the devil” 
I wouldn’t say cachaca is the same as rum - it isn’t. Both are made from sugar, but rum is made from molasses; cachaca is made from the fresh cane juice.
If you live in a place where you can get cachaça in the U.S., it shouldn’t be too hard to find erva mate, better known as yerba mate in Spanish. Pretty much any Spanish grocery store should carry it. Yerba mate with cachaça sounds pretty good, but I don’t have the patience to make mate.
By the way, I am impressed you drank something made in a bathtub. Seriously.
Meh I can get a bomba and yerba mate at my local co op in Willimantic.
I was thinking more that you’re not likely to get a real cuia and bomba overseas - could be wrong, of course. Making chimarrão in a glass or other container is a Paraguayan thing I think, and strikes me as heresy. OTOH, mate - by which I mean the drink in the Brazilian sense, which is different from chimarrão, and is used as a term distinct from the erva they’re both made from - is best cold, with lemon. (In this case it’s a brown drink, very like ice tea. Chimarrão is typically green.) I wouldn’t mix that with cachaça.
On preview: aruvqan, that’s interesting, I’ve never seen *cuias *overseas. But then, although I’ve travelled a great deal, I haven’t spent a lot of time in any places with significant Brazilian populations AFAIK. Besides, it’s only a few years ago that I first heard of chimarrão and could recognise a cuia.
As for the bathtub pinga, at least the guy claimed he’d built a still inside the bathtub, and his friend said he’d been perfecting the process for a year. Back when I lived in Tanzania (too young to have started drinking), my sister would regularly drink the local hooch - changaa, I think it was called - which was made from tossing a bunch of fruits into a bathtub with the drain stoppered. Let it ferment for a month or two, then toss out the bits, and add ethanol if desired. Apparently it was a way for poor housewives to make an extra buck. One time the moonshiner added formaldehyde instead of ethanol, leading to about a dozen deaths and many more people blinded. Compared to that, I think my fascination with cachaça, slivovitz, and regional vodkas and akvavits is harmless 
And now, just for fun, the carnival march “Cachaça não e agua” (“cachaça isn’t water”): CACHACA NAO E AGUA.wmv - YouTube
Most caipirinhas use lime, but I am also partial to caipirinha de abacaxi (pineapple) or uva (grape). The only cachaca I have found in the states is pretty harsh stuff, but when I traveled to Brazil they had a much wider selection, some of which were pretty good straight.
My wife lived in South Florida in the late 1980s; her best friend at that time was dating a Brazilian guy, whose family owned a Brazilian restaurant. Their restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, but if you knew the owners, you could order a “coffee”, which was a caipirinha in a coffee mug. 
I recently found cachaça at our neighborhood liquor store here in suburban Chicago…my wife was thrilled, and went into a caipirinha kick for some time.
Caipirinha are delicious - far and away my favorite drink.
I’ve yet to find any other way to use Cachaça that isn’t awful. It’s nearly undrinkable on its own, it hasn’t worked with anything else I’ve tried to mix it with (admittedly, I haven’t tried pineapple). And yet, Caipirinhas are really and truly delicious.
Willimantic is a college town, and as such has a population of trustafarians, so our co-op is half way between the old classic hippie grow your own veggies and be self sufficient and trustafari got to have my wierd free trade third world products. Works for me, I have a friend who adores free trade mexican hot chocolate pucks and I can get them for her there for birthdays and christmas, I can buy my gallon jug of Dr Bronner soap and grab a bag of hummus chips or a pound of lentils.
Many places that sell yerba mate will also sell the cuia (mate in Spanish) and bomba (bombilla in Spanish). Yerba mate is practically the state religion in Uruguay and Argentina and you will find it wherever there are immigrants. (And yes, mate in the Spanish sense is a hot and green drink.)
I admire your sister’s bravery. Maybe she can start a pruno wine trail thing and visit prisons. 
I drank it recently with both orange and lemon soft drinks as a mixer. Both yummy.
Mate is also the state religion of Paraguay. Their specialty is Terere that mixes yerba mate with orange juice.
And I really don’t know why mate hasn’t conquered the world yet. In Argentina you can find them in tea bags: you don’t need the bombilla and all that stuff. Its actually pretty good.
And caipirinha is the best drink in the world. If you don’t believe me have one with a brazilian girl (or boy) in one of their many, many beaches.
Cachaça is one of those liquors that’s on a very wide spectrum from rot-gut to premium— much like tequila and scotch, there are some very fine (and expensive) aged varieties available in Brazil. I found even a mid-priced cachaça to be quite drinkable on its own, last time I was in Brazil. Unfortunately, the only cachaças I’ve seen for sale here in the U.S. have been on the rot-gut end of the spectrum, albeit still pretty expensive. Fine for caipirinhas or other fruit-based drinks, but pretty harsh to drink straight.
I like yerba mate (with lots of sugar) as an alternative to coffee or tea… the Atlanta Jugglers Association is known for always keeping a pot of it brewing, which is where I was introduced to it. So are you saying that the Cachaça mixed with it is a hot drink?
Quite right-most of the brands sold in the SA are really low end ones.
Which is sad, because the better ones are much better.
Of course, when mixed as a caipirinha, you cannot tell the difference…untill next morning.
Here in Brazil we use cachaça, which most people will call pinga, only for *caipirinhas *when mixing a drink. The high end stuff can be drunk neat, as can the low end stuff if you don’t care, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s huge variations in price and quality: I can buy a liter of *cachaça *for 2$ or 150$ and you really taste the difference. Personally, I’m not a huge fan and usually go for either gin or whisky. Caipirinhas made with vodka are also very popular in Brazil and are sometimes called caipiroskas, I actually prefer them to the cachaça variety. Caipirinhas made with sake are also popular, especially if made with strawberries or kiwis, but I can’t stand the stuff.
*Mate *is drunk differently in different places in Brazil. In the south you drink it as *chimarrão *in the way described in this thread, which is the same as it’s drunk in Argentina (I can’t speak for the other places). A bit more to the north and keeping to the west people drink tereré, which uses a different cut of the leaves. You still use a bomba to drink tereré, but with cold water and usually in a horn cup (which isn’t essential in any way). In the rest of the country people just call it mate and brew it as any tea; that’s usually served cold and maybe with some lime juice.