Drinks for the Weekend -The Caipirinha

This weekend what are you planning on drinking? I don't experiment with cocktails too often, but the caipirinha is one that you can experiment successfully with to no end...
The basic caipirinha is made of the following:

• 2 oz Cachaça
• Half a lime, quartered
• 2 tsp sugar (raw sugar is best) or simple syrup
• Ice

The lime and sugar a put in the bottom of an old-fashioned glass and muddled. Basically you will have a syrup from the juice and oils from the lime and the sugar mixing together. Then you top that with ice and pour over the cachaça. Stir and serve. I love this drink just as it is, but you can do so much with it. You can substitute just about any fruit for the lime and it will be great. Orange, grapefruit, mango, and passionfruit are all combos I have tried.

Another variation is to put the fruit and sugar in a tall glass add the cachaça and then add some seltzer water or club soda. On a hot summer day, or an unseasonable warm spring afternoon these are great. 
Another thing I like to do is to add a maraschino cherry on top, and if you or your guest like some more sweetness you could easily add some of the cherry syrup for sweet color.

Where so many folks like the citrus and sweetness I tend to like things a little spicier. My most recent variation included ginger beer instead of club soda to fill the tall glass. To some it might be more like a Moscow Mule, for me the cachaça with it's sweet and spicy almost tequila meets rum flavors makes this a caipirinha variant.

So that's an idea for drinks for the weekend, I'm not sure when I will make caipirinhas again, but I will say I always try to keep the ingredients around, because they always taste good!