Cachaçagora is, as you've no doubt noticed by now, not my day-job. As the sidebar on the left-hand side of my site says, I'm an SVP at Edelman, the world's largest independently owned PR firm.
As part of this job, I help out with ABERJE's professional communications certificate program in São Paulo every year, speaking to the communications folks from some of Brazil's finest companies about the intersection between corporate affairs and social media. (ABERJE is a Brazilian professional organization for people in my line of work.) After doing this for three out of the last four years, I was finally able to puddle-jump to Rio and visit with my sogros (in-laws) for a couple of days before heading back to Chicago.
This, of course, meant cachaça... Lots and lots of cachaça.
First thing the morning after I landed in Rio, I boarded a bus with the Confraria de Cachaça Copo Furado, the cachaça-appreciation society in which my in-laws are very active.
Yes, I have the coolest in-laws in the world. Stew in your jealousy for a bit, and then read about where we went after the jump.
About 45 minutes outside of downtown Rio, there's a distillery like no other: Maxi Cana. Why is it so unique? Well, good cachaça is all about how you handle sugar, and proprietor Augusto knows more about what to do with that sugar than anyone.
The first thing you notice on Maxi Cana's product wall is the vast array of fine cachaça-based liqueurs: banana, passion fruit, cinnamon and (a personal after-dinner favorite) "Gabriela" that combines clove and cinnamon into a very nice aperitif.
As generous as Augusto was with the tour (slideshow at bottom), there was one building where no one was allowed access: the place where the liqueurs get made. (The picture below is as far as we got.)Strictly top-secret stuff.
In addition to his cachaças and liqueurs, Maxi Cana also provides bottled sweetening products. One was a simple syrup that uses glucose and fructose instead of sucrose, which is essentially common table sugar.
By way of a demonstration, he asked one of the Confraria members (a hotel bartender, no less) to make three caipirinhas: one in the traditional fashion, another with squeezed lime juice a la Tony Abou-Ganim and another using squeezed lime juice and the glucose/fructose syrup. The third was the clear winner in the taste test: crisp, refreshing taste with a color that would have been more at home in a martini glass than the rocks glasses we were using.
Obviously, I got a bottle of this glucose/fructose stuff. Also picked up a bottle of semi-evaporated cane juice just for the hell of it.
A cynic, of course, may scoff that all of this attention to sugar and sweetened cachaça products must mean that the cachaça itself is somehow inferior. Far from it. I made sure that, as part of my haul, I came back with a bottle of Maxi Cana's sublime four-year, oak-aged cachaça. I sampled generous amounts of this fine product, as well as a six-year-aged one.
Slideshow of entire trip below.
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