The cachaça in the chimarrão that I make is a hot drink, yes. Erva in a cuia with hot water&cachaça, drunk through a bomba, absolutely no sugar.
Cold mate (strained from a teabag of erva, and typically with lemon/lime juice and sugar) or tereré with cachaça I’ve never tried. Might have to try it one day
Hm, as for other ideas… as suggested above, there aren’t really any other popular mixed drinks or shooters with cachaça; it’s all variations on the caipirinha theme. Anything else is experimentation.
OK, another caipirinha variation is the batida; basically a smoothie version of a caipirinha or caipifruta. Only had one once under that name, and it was OK, but can’t remember exactly how it was made. I suppose it uses more juice, and condensed milk and/or cream.
Good call, I totally forgot about this one. Batidas are a great beach drink, but I only know how to do coconut batidas and with vodka, but I know there’s passion fruit and strawberry batidas as well (and probably many others). You’ll have to experiment to get the portions right, but what you do is you blend some coconut milk with cachaça and condensed milk and then serve that on a tall glass filled with ice. You top it off with lots of dried coconut shavings and serve it with a straw. I don’t like my drinks too sweet so I go very easy on the condensed milk and use vodka instead of pinga, but you can experiment and find your own ideal portions easily enough.
I would go with the caipirinha. I’ve had batidas but usually during Carnival or Réveillon. I’m never quite sure what goes in them and the hangover the next day can be brutal.
One mix that I haven’t seen mentioned was cachamel. It is one part cachaça, one part lime and one part honey. It isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t drink more than one.
You can always mix some into your coffee as an eyeopener. My great grandmother used to do that in her later years.
