Summer is nearly here, but summer fruit is already available at the market. Here’s a new recipe for strawberries that doesn’t have the overpowering sweetness of a frozen daiquiri.

Vaya Con Fresas (Go With Strawberries)
4 strawberries, destemmed
2 oz. spiced rum (preferably Kilo Kai)
1/2 oz. peach-flavored brandy
1/2 oz. Chambord
1/2 oz. agave nectar

In a tall rocks glass, muddle the strawberries until they’re thoroughly crushed. Add remaining ingredients and stir. Fill with ice and stir again until cold.

Sub in sugar for the agave nectar if you don’t have it. For fun, sub tequila for the rum, and any other flavoring for the peach brandy (maybe maraschino, Cointreau, or even melon liqueur).

Premixed cocktails are usually a mixed bag. In fact, they’re hardly cocktails at all but rather heavily carbonated malt liquor, watered down to about 6 or 8 percent alcohol and flavored with a variety of components that can be either reasonably tasty or very nasty.

Bacardi (which makes it share of the aforementioned malt liquor drinks) offers something new with the Bacardi Classic Cocktail Mojito, a pre-mixed cocktail that continues to build on the Mojito craze, the drink that simply will not die.

Thankfully, this is something new. Bacardi Classic Cocktail Mojito is 15 percent alcohol and made from real rum and natural flavors, not leftover King Cobra.

The taste is surprisingly good, with real rum, lime, and mint present all in the glass. The sugar flavor is a little off, tasting more saccharine than it should, but overall it’s quite pleasant. Note that the drink is not carbonated (a traditional Mojito includes club soda), so you might want to add a little if you need fizz… but then you’ll probably want to add rum too, to compensate.

This would be a fine item to serve at a party when you don’t have time to make fresh cocktails and guests aren’t expecting the world out of you. Just pour it over crushed ice and add some fresh mint and maybe a squeeze of fresh lime… most people won’t know the difference.

B / $20 (1.75-liter bottle) / bacardi.com

After my recent review of Beija cachaça, the good souls at challenger Ypióca (don’t ask me how to pronounce it) sent a volley across my bow, obliquely throwing down a little smack by claiming “every day there seems a new U.S.-made designer brand… wanting to be the next Grey Goose of the category.”

Them’s fighting words, and I agreed to take a taste of two of Ypióca’s cachaças, which the company claims are all aged a minimum of one to six years and are so popular that they’re the largest premium cachaça producer in the world. After 160 years in business, that might be expected.

So does large equal good? I put the stuff to the test.

At first glance you won’t be able to tell the difference between Ypióca Empalhada Plato and Ouro. Both bottles come wrapped in wicker shells, Chianti-style, and it’s difficult to tell by the labels which is which. Both are even listed at an odd 78 proof. But, if you’re up on your Portuguese you’ll know that Prata (silver) and Ouro (gold) might imply some aging differences, a la tequila. But it turns out both are aged for two years, Plato is aged two years in Brazilian balsam wood casks, while Ouro is aged in Freijo wood casks, a tree from the north east part of Brazil. The difference a wood makes is noticeable: The Prata has a crisp and clean cachaça character (sweet and spicy, with none of that gasoline flavor), while the Ouro has a funkier, woodsy tone that’s impregnated with smoke. If you’ve sampled silver vs. reposado tequilas side by side, you’ll have a similar impression when putting these two cachaças against each other. (The company makes at least five other cachaças, none of which I have tried, but wouldn’t hesitate to do so if I saw them available.)

Both did well in caipirinhas and sparkling caipirinhas, but preference was a matter of taste. (Namely, I liked the Prata; my wife, the cachaça freak, preferred the Ouro.) Both are excellent. Grab ‘em if you see them and don’t have to try to order them out loud.

Both are about $25, but the Prata can be much harder to find (and thus may be more expensive; shop around).

Both: A / ypioca.com.br

As discussed here, I promised my recipe for the Sparkling Caipirinha, a lighter way to sip cachaça, a Brazilian sugar cane rum. This cocktail offers the spirit of the Caipirinha but is easier to sip; more like a Mojito than a Martini.

The Sparkling Caipirinha
1/2 a lime, cut into four pieces
1 teaspoon sugar
2 oz. cachaça
7-Up

In a rocks glass muddle the lime with the sugar (use only 3 pieces of the lime if you prefer). Add the cachaça and fill with ice. Top up with 7-Up.

Delicious!

Eric Felten wrote recently that cachaça is taking the world by storm, like it or not. The unofficial national spirit of Brazil, cachaça is used to make Brazil’s official national cocktail, the Caipirinha. Brazil produces over a billion liters of the stuff each year, and only 1% of it ever leaves the country. Brazilians, they love their cachaça.

Cachaça (roughly pronounced ka-SHAH-zuh) is essentially fermented sugar cane juice. It’s similar to rum, except rum is aged in oak and can be made from molasses. But cachaça has a significantly different flavor, a stronger, sharper tone that many compare unfavorably to gasoline. I’m hard-pressed to argue with that. Drinking cachaça straight, no matter who makes it, is nearly impossible.

Better to give the Caipirinha a spin instead. The Caipirinha (roughly pronounced kai-pah-REEN-yah) is just cachaça muddled with lime and sugar, topped up with ice. It’s a stout drink, but the lime and sugar complement the cachaça well. (Lesser drinkers may try the Sparkling Caipirinha instead, recipe here, which many like even better.)

All of which brings us to Beija’s cachaça, a new entry into the cachaça market and, so they claim, the “world’s first virgin cane rum.” (Virgin means it is distilled from the first pressing of sugar cane only, much like virgin olive oil.)

Few spirits have been consumed as rapidly at Drinkhacker HQ as Beija (pronounced BAY-zha) has, namely by my wife, who loves the aforementioned sparkling cocktail, provided limes are around. I think Beija is pretty good, too: It has little of the firewater tone of most cachaças, and in cocktails it is sweet and smooth, with a lightly floral note instead of a lighter fluid one. It’s distinctive without being overpowering. Tastes a little like candy. (I compared it side by side with Leblon cachaça and there was no comparison that Beija was far superior.)

Would I rather drink a premium rum than cachaça? Probably, but if you’re looking for something off the beaten path, Beija is as good as it gets. Watch for it on store shelves in the near future.

A- / $30 / beija.net

I had a mango. This is what I came up with. Use as ripe a mango as you can. Add sugar as needed if it isn’t sweet enough.

The Shrubb Rush
1 mango, chopped
2 pineapple spears, chopped
6 oz. pineapple juice
6 oz. rum (I used Jamaican Sea Wynde)
1/2 oz. Creole Shrubb (or other orange liqueur)

Put all items into a blender, fill with ice. Blend until (relatively) smooth. Makes 4-6 drinks.

OK, let’s say you want to make something vaguely tropical, but you don’t have any tropical juices, coconut cream, or little umbrellas. Here’s a quick and dirty way to get a little tropical flavor into a glass with stuff you have on the shelf.

The Ghetto Mai Tai
1 oz. white rum
1 oz. dark rum (or spiced rum)
splash Malibu (if you have it)
ginger ale

Build over a Collins glass filled with ice. Add rums, then fill with ginger ale. Garnish with whatever’s handy.

I tossed some marinated pineapple in for my garnish (you can sort-of see them at the bottom of the glass). You can use maraschino cherries, an orange wedge, lemon, lime, or any other fruit, to be honest. Maybe drop in a dash of grenadine for color. Sub in Soho lychee, Chambord, Alize, or Maraschino liqueur for the Malibu, if you like. Knock yourself out. No, it won’t get you to Hawaii, but at least it’ll get you to Haiti.

When it comes to spiced rum, most people (including myself) pretty much know one brand: Good old Captain Morgan. Nothing wrong with that. The Cap’n takes boring old Bacardi and infuses it with a vague taste of the tropics and the nostalgia of, er, spice traders, pirates, and saucy wenches.

The problem is that Captain Morgan is hardly the top of the line. Dump a shot in a glass of Coke and it’s fine enough, but try it straight and it comes across as a middling rum with a harsh finish and no real distinguishable spice to it, just a vague, almost chemical heat. (I give it a B. At $14 a bottle it’s a decent deal.)

Enter Kilo Kai Spiced Rum, a brand new bottling from Curacao and spiced the way rum ought to be. I tried it straight, head to head with the good Captain and another spiced rum called Kuya. (Don’t bother looking for Kuya; it’s so undrinkably awful I give it an F.) The difference was quite noticeable. While the Captain Morgan rum was hot and harsh, the Kilo Kai was much smoother, with a creamy texture and a clear flavor of honey and cinnamon. That said, the Captain Morgan tastes a lot more clearly of rum, while the Kilo Kai could have had a based of almost anything. Breathe in and it’s the spice that you inhale, not the sugary rum.

It was also quite good mixed in Coke, and I’ll be working on some cocktails with it over the next few weeks. Watch for these! Oh, and the bottle is pretty cool, too. The rough “grip tape” wrap at the top of the bottle is especially memorable.

Kilo Kai is not yet available in stores. Watch for it soon; it’s definitely worth the price.

A / $20 / kilokai.com