Cocktails Around the World

The cocktail is not an American invention that spread outward to a grateful world. Long before Jerry Thomas published his Bar-Tender's Guide, people around the world were mixing spirits with local ingredients in ways that expressed their particular cultures, climates, and agricultural traditions. The modern cocktail conversation has, for too long, centered on the American and British traditions while ignoring what was happening in Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Italy, and dozens of other places. These are stories of drinks that emerged from specific soils and specific histories.

Caipirinha: Brazil

Cachaça and Cane Culture

The Caipirinha — cachaça, lime, sugar, ice — is Brazil's national cocktail and one of the most direct expressions of a country's agricultural identity in any drink. Cachaça is distilled from fresh sugar cane juice (rather than molasses, which distinguishes it from most rums), and its flavor carries the green, grassy, slightly earthy character of the cane itself. Combined with fresh-cut limes and unrefined sugar, the result is intensely Brazilian: tropical, direct, and unapologetically alcoholic.

The caipirinha's origins are uncertain in detail but clear in context: it emerged from Brazil's sugar cane culture, probably in the interior of São Paulo state, in the early twentieth century. Early versions may have been medicinal — cachaça, lime, and garlic were reportedly combined as a treatment for the 1918 influenza epidemic. The medicinal frame gave way to the recreational, and the drink spread from the interior to the coastal cities and eventually to the world.

The Sour family connection is clear — cachaça, lime, sugar is the same template as the daiquiri or the margarita — but the caipirinha's technique is distinctive. The limes are cut into quarters (not juiced) and Muddling directly in the glass with sugar, then the cachaça is poured over ice that is added after the muddling. The resulting drink contains both fresh juice and lime peel oils, which gives it a more bitter and aromatic character than a strained sour.

Pisco Sour: Peru (and Chile)

The Disputed Heritage

The Pisco Sour is a national pride issue of remarkable intensity between Peru and Chile, both of which claim pisco — a brandy distilled from grapes — as their own. The dispute extends to cocktail recipes, production regulations, and international trade disputes. In Peru, the pisco sour consists of Peruvian pisco, fresh lime juice, simple syrup, egg white, and Angostura bitters — served foamy and frothy, with the bitters floated on the foam as garnish. In Chile, the recipe is similar but uses Chilean pisco (a different style, typically lighter and less aromatic) and may omit the bitters.

The cocktail's invention is attributed to Victor Morris, an American expatriate who opened Morris's Bar in Lima in 1916. Morris, who had worked in American bars before arriving in Peru, applied the Sour template to local pisco. His bartender, Mario Bruiget, subsequently developed the egg-white foam version that is now standard.

The Dry Shake — shaking without ice first to build the egg-white foam, then adding ice for the final shake — is essential to the pisco sour. The technique produces a foam of exceptional stability and texture that is integral to the drink's experience. Understanding the dry-shake is understanding half of what makes the pisco sour great.

Mojito: Cuba

Sugar, Mint, and Revolution

The Mojito — white rum, fresh lime juice, sugar, mint, soda water — is perhaps the most globally recognized Cuban cocktail, associated with Havana café culture and, inevitably, with Ernest Hemingway, who allegedly drank them at La Bodeguita del Medio. (Hemingway may or may not have actually favored this bar — the attribution is disputed and may be a marketing invention.) The drink's components reflect Cuba's agricultural wealth: sugar from the cane fields, lime from the citrus groves, rum from the distilleries.

The mojito's historical roots are in the draque, a colonial-era Cuban drink made with aguardiente (rough cane spirit), lime, sugar, and mint — a medicine as much as a pleasure drink. As Cuba's rum industry refined its product in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the draque evolved into the mojito. By the time of the Prohibition, when Americans flooded into Havana seeking legal alcohol, the mojito was already a Havana institution.

The mojito's global spread has been a mixed blessing. At its best — fresh mint, fresh lime, good white rum, quality soda, proper sweetening — it is one of the great refreshing drinks. In most commercial versions, it is made with pre-muddled mint from a bottle, bottled lime juice, cheap rum, and sweet soda, producing something that shares a name with the original and nothing else. Rum: White, Gold, Dark & Beyond is central to understanding why the mojito matters.

Aperol Spritz: Italy

The Aperitivo Tradition

The Spritz in its Venetian form — white wine, sparkling water, a bitter liqueur — predates the Aperol Spritz by more than a century. Austrian soldiers stationed in Venice during the Habsburg occupation of northern Italy in the early nineteenth century added sparkling water to local wine, finding it more refreshing than the undiluted Italian wine they were unaccustomed to. The practice spread and eventually merged with Venice's existing aperitivo culture, producing the bitter-wine-soda combination that is now associated with the Veneto region.

Aperol — a lower-alcohol orange bitter liqueur — was introduced by the Barbieri brothers at the 1919 Padova trade fair and slowly became the dominant spirit in the regional spritz formula. The Aperol Spritz as currently specified — 3 parts Prosecco, 2 parts Aperol, 1 splash of soda, orange slice — was actively promoted by Campari Group (which acquired Aperol in 2003) as a global aperitivo category drink.

The Aperol Spritz's international explosion from roughly 2010 onward is a case study in the intersection of genuine cultural tradition and effective marketing. The drink is genuinely Italian, genuinely traditional in its Venetian context, and genuinely pleasant: lower in alcohol than most cocktails, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, refreshing. It is also beautifully orange, photogenic, and easily reproducible without skilled bartenders. Its Instagram moment generated enormous commercial success, and it is now ordered in bars worldwide with only slightly more connection to its Venetian origins than a Hawaiian pizza has to Hawaii.

The World's Cocktail Diversity

These four drinks represent not a definitive survey but a sampling of how specific — how rooted in place, climate, and culture — cocktail traditions can be. The Mezcal: Smoke, Earth & Agave tradition of southern Mexico, the Absinthe: The Green Fairy's Guide culture of the Swiss and French Jura, the aguardiente traditions of Colombia and Ecuador, the baijiu culture of China — each represents a distinct way of thinking about spirits and mixing that the global craft cocktail conversation is only beginning to integrate. The history of cocktails is, at its deepest level, a history of local agriculture, climate, and culture finding expression in a glass.