Cocktails of the wider world

Every spirit is a story about where sugar, grain or fruit grew and who had the stills. Seven drinks from seven countries, none of them American, show how a spirit arrives and how a place makes it its own.

Sugar cane: the caipirinha

Cachaca is Brazil's cane-juice spirit, and the caipirinha is the simplest thing you can do with it: lime cut into pieces, sugar, muddled in the glass, cachaca and ice. The name means something like little country girl, and Difford's Guide places its origin in the countryside of Sao Paulo state, where the cane grew and the cachaca of Piracicaba was made. The popular story has it begin as a remedy during the influenza epidemic around 1918, a mix of cachaca, lime, honey and garlic that reached the port of Santos and took the name there. That is a story, not a record. What is certain is that cachaca was the cheap, everyday spirit of the country, and that the drink built on it became Brazil's signature only when the rest of the world noticed.

Grapes: the pisco sour

Pisco is a grape brandy with two homes that agree on nothing. Peru pot-distils it and leaves it unaged; Chile column-distils it and often rests it in wood; each claims the name under its own protections. The sour that made the spirit famous is, on the best evidence, an American's drink. Victor Vaughan Morris of Salt Lake City went to Peru in 1903 to work for the Cerro de Pasco railway and on 1 April 1916 opened Morris' Bar in Lima, and the Peruvian magazine Mundial credited a Mr Morris with the Pisco Sour in April 1921. The story that he ran out of whiskey and reached for the local spirit is told everywhere and documented nowhere. One of his bartenders, Mario Bruiget, is credited with adding the bitters, and in some accounts the egg white, of the Peruvian version, and a 1903 Peruvian cookbook with a pisco, egg and lime cocktail suggests the idea was in the air before Morris. Chile's rival claim, for an English steward in 1870s Iquique, collapsed when the quoted passage turned out to describe a whiskey sour. Peru has kept Pisco Sour Day on the first Saturday of February since 2004.

Grain and soda: the highball in Japan

In 1937 Shinjiro Torii, Suntory's founder, released the whisky that became known as Kakubin, the square bottle. In the 1950s the company opened thousands of small Tory's bars that sold its whisky in mixed drinks, with an eye on American bar culture, and the highball, whisky with soda over ice, was the drink that stuck. By 2007 whisky consumption was about a sixth of its 1983 peak.

The revival was engineered. Suntory's researchers found that drinkers wanted something around eight percent alcohol to start a meal, and in September 2008 the company launched the Kakubin highball to izakaya in a beer mug: one part whisky, three or four parts hard soda poured so as not to hit the ice, one gentle stir. Fifty thousand pubs had it within two years, and whisky sales rose in 2008 for the first time in more than twenty-five years.

Grain and beer: somaek

Soju came to Korea in the thirteenth century with the Mongols, who carried distilling across their empire under the Arabic-derived name arak, and for most of its history it was made slowly by distilling rice wine. The historian Hyunhee Park describes how the modern product, mass-made from neutral ethanol, water and flavorings, became one of the cheapest spirits in the world.

Somaek is soju and beer, the name a blend of soju and maekju, poured together in a beer glass without ice. The ratio most Koreans quote is three parts soju to seven parts beer, though every table has its own view. There is no documented origin. Every source hedges the same way: it was likely popularized by office workers drinking with their bosses, where pouring for colleagues is part of the evening. We present it as popular tradition, which is what it is.

Cane again: poncha

Madeira was claimed by Portugal in 1419 and planted with sugar cane soon after, and for a few decades it was the world's main source of sugar. The cane stayed after the sugar trade moved to Brazil, and the island still distils a cane-juice rum, the aguardente de cana. Poncha is that spirit beaten with lemon juice and sugar or honey, using a wooden tool called the caralhinho, until it froths. The sharper, lemon-forward pescador style comes from the fishing village of Camara de Lobos; the regional style, with orange and honey, came later. Nobody knows who first combined the three; the food writer Teresa Vivas suggests an early colonial origin. The claim that the name descends from the Indian panch, via punch, is plausible and unproven. Poncha became an everyday drink only in the twentieth century, and a 2014 decree protects the name for drinks made on Madeira and Porto Santo.

Wine and water: the spritz

The spritz began as dilution. In the nineteenth century, when the Veneto was ruled from Vienna, Austrian soldiers billeted in local taverns found the wine stronger than the beer they were used to and asked for a splash of water in it; spritzen is German for to splash. Wine and soda in roughly equal parts was the result. The bitter element came later. The Barbieri brothers presented Aperol at Padua's first trade fair in 1919, and by the 1950s it was being added to the wine-and-soda base. The orange version became an international fashion in the 2010s, with Gruppo Campari counting about 300,000 spritzes a day in the Veneto alone.

Beer and lime: the michelada

Mexico has doctored its beer with lime and hot sauce since at least the 1940s, a tradition called cerveza preparada. The michelada is the name that stuck to it, and the account Mexican food historians accept, as Excelsior reports it, puts the naming in the 1970s at the Club Deportivo Potosino in San Luis Potosi, where an engineer named Michel Esper, hungover after tennis, asked for his beer in an iced mug with lime and salt, and other members began ordering Michel's lemonade. The name folds his into helada, frosty. A rival story credits a General Augusto Michel in the 1940s; Excelsior files it with the legends. It crossed into Texas in the 1990s.

Folklore and fact

Fact: Morris's 1916 bar and the 1921 magazine credit; Kakubin's 1937 launch and the 2008 campaign figures; Aperol's 1919 debut; the 2014 Madeira decree; the 1970s Club Potosino account of the michelada. Folklore or tradition: the 1918 caipirinha remedy, the whiskey-sour substitution, the salaryman origin of somaek, the Indian root of the word poncha, and the Austrian soldiers, who are the standard account of the spritz and may well be right, but who left no dated record.

Sources

• Caipirinha. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/354/caipirinha
• History of the Pisco Sour cocktail. Cocktail Society, Sina Torner, 2023. https://cocktail-society.com/history/pisco-sour-history-and-origin/
• Pisco sour. Wikipedia, undated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisco_sour
• Suntory Whisky Kakubin. House of Suntory, undated. https://house.suntory.com/kakubin-whisky
• Highball Fever. Metropolis, 2009. https://metropolisjapan.com/highball-fever/
• 10 ways to drink Japanese whisky, 1: the whisky highball. Nomunication, 2018. https://www.nomunication.jp/2018/04/24/10-ways-to-drink-japanese-whisky-1-whisky-highball/
• Soju: A Global History (blog post). Cambridge University Press, Hyunhee Park, 2021. https://cambridgeblog.org/?p=37265
• Somaek. Wikipedia, undated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaek
• Soju Bomb, Somaek, or Somaekcol? Honest Food Talks, Victoria Yap, 2024. https://www.honestfoodtalks.com/soju-bomb-somaek/
• Poncha, Madeira's summer staple. Punch, Austin Bush, 2023. https://punchdrink.com/?p=155495
• What Is Poncha And How Is It Made? The Daily Meal, Arianna Endicott, 2023. https://www.thedailymeal.com/1461317/what-is-poncha-and-how-is-it-made
• Poncha: Madeira's Liquid Legacy. Times of Madeira, 2023. https://timesofmadeira.com/poncha-madeiras-liquid-legacy
• Spritz: history. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1255/spritz/history
• The spritz and Aperol in Padua. Turismo Padova, undated. https://www.turismopadova.it/en/?p=9820
• Michelada: What you think you know is likely wrong. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Tiney Ricciardi, 2018. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/23/michelada-what-you-think-you-know-is-li/
• El verdadero origen de la michelada. Excelsior, Enrique Lopez, undated. https://www.excelsior.com.mx/recetas/verdadero-origen-michelada-club-potosino-exito-mundial
• Pisco Sour (Difford's recipe) and history. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/1563/pisco-sour