Hi. My name is Phil Gomes. By day, I work at a public relations firm as its senior vice president of digital integration. I'm a proud SF East Bay native who currently lives in Chicago.
I was introduced to cachaça by my wife, a Carioca. Her mom, in turn, is the president of the Confraria de Cachaça do Copo Furado, a group that meets monthly to talk about Brazil's indigenous spirit. I participated in one of their meetings when I vacationed in Rio in July 2008.
This started me thinking about the basic question of whether cachaça in the U.S. is today where, say, tequila was some decades ago.
So I decided to start this blog as a means to record and share the cachaça-related items I've been seeing day-to-day. I hope to be sharing recipes, impressions, and random thoughts as the U.S. continues to catch on to the potential for this particular spirit.
Oh... The name? "Cachaçagora" is a portmanteau of "Cachaça" and "agora", which is the Portuguese word for "now". In Greek, "agora" also means public square. I hope to meet the expectations of both.
Saúde!
cachacagora~~
at~~
gmail~~
dot~~
com
Rating System
Five barrels: Baptize your kid with this. Immediately.
Four barrels: This should be in your special stash. Hide it from your uncle and the guy who keeps wanting to borrow your truck.
Three barrels: Decent.
Two barrels: Almost guaranteed to turn into a four-barrel-rated cachaça after the third one. Cocktail-mixture is absolutely essential.
One barrel: If Wolverine from the X-Men wanted to go on a serious bender with this stuff, his mutant healing-factor would come in quite handy.
Zero barrels: Your engine block probably needs cleaning, doesn't it?
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In short, treat me as your host and I will treat you as my guest.
The good folks at Leblon sent over a number of Valentine's Day drink recipes.
Most intriguing among the set was the Passion Tea, pictured above.
Passion Tea
1 ½ oz. Leblon Cachaça
½ oz. Cointreau
½ oz. Monin Red Passion Fruit Syrup
5 oz. Hot Black Tea
Brew the black tea. Pour Leblon followed by the Cointreau
and Monin Red Passion Fruit Syrup with the hot tea into a handled glass. Stir
thoroughly.
Tea, in general, is a relatively unexplored mixer, I think. Some are even doing a good job of making distilled spirits out of it! I toured St. George's Distillery with my wife and in-laws in November 2007 and discovered Qi, which is a tea-based liqueur. Qi Black, which incorporates the smoky-tasting lapsang suchong tea, is pretty incredible.
To some Super Bowl
fans, drinking anything other than beer during the game is pure
blasphemy. Let those nay-sayers swill their watery brew from cans, we
plan on making cocktails for our Super Bowl party.
Thus, he brings us the Bloody Carioca:
Bloody Carioca
2 oz. Leblon cachaça
5 oz. tomato juice
½ oz. lemon juice
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
Pinch each of: celery salt, cracked pepper, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, and onion powder.
Shake all the ingredients on ice and pour into a highball rimmed with paprika. Stir well and garnish with a slice of cucumber.
There's a great, comprehensive wrap-up piece over at Booze Muse about the state of cachaça in the U.S. The article focuses on the efforts of several brands to elevate our favorite spirit from its perception as a cheap, rough, engine-cleaner of a drink to a premium category.
Today, however, cachaça is reaching a more refined audience thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated companies that have done a lot to bring the spirit to a higher level. “Cachaça is today in the same position that vodka, chianti and tequila were about fifteen years ago,” explains Steve Luttman, producer of Leblon, one of the more recent brands specially created for the international market. “The images of these three categories were dramatically changed in quality and presentation via Absolut or Grey Goose for vodka, Antinori for chianti and El Patron for tequila—each of these brought a better product to the market with much superior sales and marketing.”
Leblon has a video about industrial versus artisanal cachaça or, as it's often referred to here, "cachaça de alambique". For those unfamiliar with the differences, it's a must-watch and definitely worth six minutes of your time.
I actually met Paulo Magoulas (above) at a meeting of the Confraria de Cachaça do Copo Furado this past July. His explanation of the the key differences between the two production methods starts about a minute and forty seconds into the video. He's credited here as the president of the Brazilian Cachaça Academy in Rio.
As I recounted in an early post about my rating system, a wine journalist once told me that, at the end of the day, there were just three kinds of wine: "Good", "sucks", and "more please." If a producer that uses industrial methods creates something that pleases the palate, I don't much care whether they distilled the thing in a column still, pot still, or neighbor's kitchen sink.
(Okay... I'll admit... I'd care a little if it came from the sink.)
That said, what a distiller gains in volume he generally loses in control over the product, as well as overall character.
Sagatiba clearly sees a market for products produced in either fashion. Its Pura brand uses the industrial column-still method, while Velha uses the artisanal pot-still technique. Luxury Experience has the details.
I gave Pura a three-and-a-half-barrel rating, so I certainly didn't think it was a terrible result of industrial techniques. I still stand by my contention, however, that a lot of personality got distilled out of it. (I compared it to how "good" vodkas are supposed to kind of "disappear" into a mixer, which is a pretty terrible way to look at your craft if you happen to make vodka for a living.) A Pura-based caipirinha certainly isn't the "mortal sin" that Paulo says one commits by mixing with an industrial cachaça. (I save the "mortal sin" designation for folks who sneak from my cachaça stash.)
(Sidenote: I haven't yet gotten around to Velha, but the samples have been staring at me from the counter for months now.)
In any case, taste what you like. I won't judge. *8-)
The Rumdood (née Matt Robold) talks a bit about the Leblon-sponsored Thursday Drink Night and shares his favorite, the São Paulo Iced Tea.
São Paulo Iced Tea
2 oz Leblon Cachaça
1 oz Absolut Peach Vodka
1 oz Gin
0.5 oz Cointreau
0.5 oz Lemon Juice
0.5 oz Lime Juice
0.5 oz Simple Syrup
Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a tall glass with ice and top with soda. Garnish with a sprig of mint.
Matt says:
What I really enjoy about this drink is the way the strong, overripe fruit notes of the cachaca play with the citrus juice and the peach flavor of the vodka. The drink is light and refreshing. Winter is the completely wrong season for sipping this drink (but hello new favorite summertime drink!), but I can't stop making these and toying with little changes to the recipe to suit my mood.
It occurs to me that this is Thursday night! However, I've got some packing to do. Heading to Hong Kong and Sydney. If any of my readers know where I can have myself some good cachaça while I'm out there, let me know. Tchau 'till then...
I was traveling to Seoul, Tokyo, New Brunswick, and New York the past two weeks. For all that, there was no way I was going to miss Leblon stopping by the Mixoloseum Thursday Drink Night chat.
Two greatroundups have the cocktail recipes the group shared, plus all of the photographic goodness.
Great to see that Leblon founder/CEO Steve Luttmann showed up. Hell... He says he even likes our shirts!
UPDATE 2008-11-26: Kaiser Penguin put up a best-of wrap-up as well.
Cut lime and place in a shaker with agave nectar and muddle. Add crushed ice,
Leblon Cachaça, pumpkin puree and Canton in the shaker. Shake well and garnish
with nutmeg, pumpkin flesh twist and lime wheel.
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