Sharkbait’s Cocktail of the Week: Friends in the Right Places

Welcome back to the best day of the week. This week’s drink is the result of an innocent, half joking ask of my bartender friend of what I should make. I expected him to reply with some over the top nonsense that only he can concoct with special ingredients at his bar, but no. He suggested I make a caipirinha, which is one of his favorites to make at home on his days off. Now, I’ve been intrigued with making one but I had no idea where to even find cachaça. However my friend said that a rhum agricole would be a pretty close substitute. Thankfully, I still have most of a bottle I brought back from St. Martin in June so I’ll be using that today. Now here is the not so structured recipe:

Recipe is stupid simple: one lime, approximately a palmful of sugar (cane sugar or golden sugar is best, but white sugar works just fine), and 2 oz of rum. Cut off ends of lime, then cut into wedges. Put wedges into shaker tin, add sugar, and muddle limes until sugar is incorporated into lime juice. Add rum, add cubed ice and shake for 6 seconds. Dirty dump into glass. Add an additional lime wedge for an optional garnish

Mostly lime nose, with a little bit of sweetness underneath the lime smell. It does a good job covering the rhum’s natural scent, which is hard to do because of the nature of the rhum agricole with its pure sugar cane smell being so strong.

Wow. this is not at all what I thought this would taste like. I was thinking this was going to be heavy on the rhum agricole like the ti’ punch was. I get next to no bitterness or anything related to the sugar cane flavors. I get a nice and refreshing sweet and sour mix from the muddled lime and sugar, with just a hint of the lime underneath it all that I can start to pick out after a few seconds. Thankfully it doesn’t really take over once I pick up the distinctive flavors. It’s a rather nice background player here. It lets you know there is in fact rum in this. However, being that this is all rum, it could be a little dangerous since it is so good, and you don’t realize this is essentially straight booze. It finishes very well, it’s a nice mixture of the all the flavors mentioned above and doesn’t leave any kind of aftertaste, so you wanna go back in for another sip. I can easily see myself taking down two or three of these bad boys in a single session on a hot summer afternoon/evening.

One thing I would do differently is strain this. My bartender friend said to dirty dump into the glass, but the downside of that is, I get a lot of lime pulp from the muddling in my drink. While the juice is good, the fibrous bits from the fruit are kind of a turn off. Not a drink ruiner by any means, but a minor, first world problem-esque level of annoyance. So when I make this again (believe me, there will be a next time) I’ll either reduce the amount of muddling I do in the shaker, or I’ll strain it and add fresh ice into my glass.

(Banner image courtesy Matthew Tetrault Photography)