Coffee in Brazil

  
Eu gostaria de um café gelado, por favor.

Confused, weirded-out looks in response.

Não, não tenho isso aqui.

Então posso eu ter um copo de gelo para o meu café?

I landed in Rio during a heatwave in February.  It's a tropical, equatorial country and February is summer.  Add a heatwave to that and I would drip sweat just putting on my clothes on each morning.  (I have a hard time perspiring in general, running indoors doesn't get a sweat going for me.)

Since Brazilians do not drink it and consider iced coffee to be unacceptable and flat out "weird" as I've been told by a brazuca who lived in the US for 10 years, the best this New Yorker coffee addict could do was order a glass of ice with each coffee.  Asking for a coffee results in an espresso called a cafezinho (literally, small coffee), as you see in my photo above taken one block from Ipanema beach.  That gorgeous marigold background is actually a trash bin!  You use the top of the trash bin as a high bar table, then dispose of your paper & plastic into it.


Since this particular vendor owning the marigold trash bin was too irritated to give me a cup of ice, I drank this cafezinho in 104degrees F.

Heck, an iced coffee is momentary sanctuary on a hot day!  Ask any New Yorker, it's our favorite go-to drink to cool off, an absolute necessity.  Hence, the per-block Starbucks existence surrounding Union Square.  In European-influenced Latin America, coffee in paper cups and I suppose even iced coffee are considered crass.  If I recall reading correctly an article years ago, Starbucks had difficulty penetrating Brazil due to the locals dislike of paper cups.  (But walk into Leblon shopping mall, and there is a sofa lounge of chic-looking brasileiros at the Starbucks station smack in the middle of the mall.  I considered buying a Rio Starbucks portable canister before checking the insane price typical of the brand.)

There are lots of rules to enjoy coffee properly.  No cappuccino in Italy past noon, only tourists order that.  In Korea, they love their coffee with lots of milk and sugar.  Last I checked, espresso was an inconceivable order.  In Peru, even the most humble mom-and-pop shack in Huanchaco served delicious coffee on a tray with cream and sugar in metal servers with a delicate spoon.  In Brasil, no iced coffee. 

So improvise with the totally offhand request for ice!