What to drink on Fat Tuesday 2009? A caipirinha.

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As Brazilians prepare to collectively fall in a sweaty, satisfied heap after five days of rigorous, devoted partying, and Americans gear up for Fat Tuesday, when the social season stages its last booze-soaked hurrah, my mind turns to the king of pre-Lent cocktails: the caipirinha.

Made with cachaca (Brazil’s most popular spirit), sugar and muddled limes, a well-crafted caipirinha is a thing of simplistic beauty. Slightly cloudy, sour but not bitter, imbued with a ghostly white-green hue and kissed with sweetness, the cocktail is perfect just about any time of the year.

Americans aren’t generally aware of the particular pleasures of cachaca, and when they first taste it are often not sure what to think. Distilled from sugar cane (Brazil’s most prominent crop), cachaca has a lip-curling potency, an oddly sweet pungency and an almost indescribable flavor -- somewhat plant-like, with hints of honey and rotting summer-rain-soaked leaves. Weird, I know, but something I regularly crave.

I first discovered the caipirinha in the summer of 2004 when I was vacationing in Rio de Janeiro with my parents. We were rambling around the Copacabana neighborhood, looking for a non-tourist trap restaurant, when we came across a little Italian joint with communal tables covered in checked cloth. Unsure of what to order for a drink, I asked the waiter in convoluted Spanish (note to everyone who has tried to tell me otherwise: Speaking Spanish does not mean that people who speak Portuguese will understand you) for a recommendation. Five minutes later I was presented with the first of what would turn out to be many caipirinhas.

I drank the alluring concoction nightly during the next week of my vacation, and I so fell in love with the drink and the city that I made plans to rent an apartment and fly back to stay for the month of November. My apartment was on the 10th floor of a long, modern residential complex just a block from Copacabana beach (just off Avenida Atlantica).

The goal was to write a novel, but along the way I became obsessed with Brazilian barbecue (churrasco) and with discovering the secret to the perfect caipirinha. In a month’s time I gained almost 10 pounds. I went out every night, and sometimes at lunch too. I ordered up the drink at practically every restaurant I could find.

As is often the case with objects of desire, I never found a caipirinha as good as my first. But I came close. It was a slow weekday night, the air was heat-soaked and thick with the scent of cooking sausages. I was at a graffiti-covered pool hall in the raucous Lapa neighborhood.

The bartender who made the magic potion kindly explained to me his secret: A truly good caipirinha can be created only when you cut the white seam out of the middle of the lime. It is this seam that can impart an unwanted bitterness. Revelation! Such a simple answer, but so true. Later that week I tried my hand at it in my apartment, and I almost got it right.

I have yet to have a truly perfect caipirinha in Los Angeles. That must be because I have never seen a bartender cut the white heart out of the lime. The Bazaar’s nitro caipirinha is delicious, but since it’s frozen it doesn’t quite count. It also costs $20, which seems counterintuitive for a drink made with cachaca, which is, by Brazilian standards, the drink of the proletariat.

America has of late seen a rise of designer cachacas (like Leblon).

Here’s hoping that enough people come to appreciate the spirit that it finds its way into everyday circulation at regular old neighborhood bars.

-- Jessica Gelt

Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times