Brasil 66

A citrusy, orange-infused twist on the Caipirinha — named for the iconic Brazilian jazz band. Cachaça shaken with triple sec, orange juice, lime, and a touch of sweetness.

The Brasil 66 cocktail takes its name from Sérgio Mendes & Brasil '66, the Brazilian musician's vehicle for bringing bossa nova and Brazilian popular music to international commercial success in the mid-to-late 1960s. Sérgio Mendes, born in Niterói, Brazil in 1941, had worked with Tom Jobim and other bossa nova musicians in Rio de Janeiro's jazz club scene before relocating to the United States in the mid-1960s, where he signed with Herb Alpert's A&M Records and formed the Brasil '66 ensemble — a group whose instrumentation and two-female-voice frontline gave his recordings a distinctive sound. The 1966 debut album, Herb Alpert Presents Sérgio Mendes & Brasil '66, broke through on the strength of "Mas Que Nada," a cover of a Jorge Ben samba tune sung entirely in Portuguese — a rarity for a U.S. chart hit at the time. The group followed with a string of hits over the next few years, including a bossa nova-inflected cover of "Scarborough Fair" that reached the U.S. Top 20 in 1968, cementing Mendes as one of the most commercially successful Latin music acts in American history. The cocktail extends the classic Caipirinha — cachaça, lime, sugar — by adding orange juice and triple sec, the orange element both sweetening the lime's tartness and adding the citrus depth that gives the drink a rounder, more accessible profile, in a manner analogous to what Sérgio Mendes himself did with Brazilian music — accessible, international, and genuinely rooted in its source culture.