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
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?
Sagatiba appears to be doing a particularly good job of developing and sharing cachaça-based cocktails for the Fall season, something I mentioned in the most recent State of the Spirit post. Enjoy!
Autumn Breeze
Saga 7
Bikini Martini
"Chef Mark" Tafoya comes through again with another cachaça cocktail recipe, this time featuring Leblon and the quite misunderstood absinthe, masterfully mixed by Junior "The Liquid Chef" Merino.
Longtime readers might remember the Sagatiba video feature Mark did in July.
You'll also want to check out another cachaça/absinthe recipe, Summer in São Paulo.
Variety reports that filmmaker Pedro Urano won the "Best Documentary" award for his film Estrada Real da Cachaça ("The Royal Road of Cachaça").
Here's a six-minute demo reel of the film:
Estrada Real da Cachaca (The Royal Road of Cachaca) from Pedro Urano on Vimeo.
Would love to get a hold of this somehow. I have to imagine that the next step for this would be to submit it to the film festivals in the U.S., especially the wide variety of Latino film festivals we have up here.
Oh... Pssst... Hey Pedro... The 2009 Chicago Latino Film Festival call-for-entries is due December 19, 2008 (PDF).
This sounds like it was recorded with a bunch of angry hornets in a rusty can, but I wouldn't mind finding a cleaner copy of this song — "Um Litro de Cachaça" from Curitiba, Brazil's, own psychobilly band Chernobillies.
Hat tip: Zombilly
While pronouncing our favorite drink "CATCH-ah-suh" is about as grating as calling the producers of this segment "Rooters", here's a piece that apparently ran yesterday:
more cat pictures
No one really wants to watch advertising. To remain relevant, brands need to adopt behavior more akin to media companies, delivering their brand message within content that offers educational, entertainment, or journalistic quality.
This is why I'm very much into what Leblon and Sagatiba are doing on YouTube.
Last week, Sagatiba quietly launched its SagatibaUS YouTube channel, which will evidently be the home for its excellent Premium Side Of Brasil mini-documentaries.
(Earlier episodes were previously hosted on an account named "paulosagatiba". Global Brand Ambassador John Gakuru has some of his own videos up as well.)
Rather than hit you over the head with cloying messages about how great its product is, Sagatiba wants to align itself with everything that is good -- "premium", even -- about Brazil. The first videos posted to the SagatibaUS account offer perspectives from a Brasilian fashion designer, a carpenter, and a chef.
Leblon's content is quite a bit more obvious about its commercial interests, though also appears to be doing a bit more to educate folks about cachaça itself.
They have the Naren and Jacob series, helpful how-to videos, and even a music video that (I'm guessing here) is aimed at getting Americans to pronounce "caipirinha" correctly. (You just have to get past the notion that someone would name their daughter "Caipirinha".)
Heck, they even have a site called, appropriately enough, Cachaça 101, with an entertaining man-on-the-street video of random pedestrians mangling the pronunciation of our favorite distilled spirit.
The point is, both efforts are engaging at different levels. Advertising, in the strictest sense, interrupts -- your favorite TV show, radio program, magazine, city's skyline, etc. Educating bartenders and consumers as to the value of cachaça (and, hopefully, entertaining them along the way) can only be a good thing.
From Cuca Brazuca:
I visited Guanabara - London’s premiere Brazilian live music venue - and got the 2 best barman in the house to prepare us a couple of Brazilian cocktails with a difference. Check out this recipe for ‘Riotini’ (a Martini made with Passion Fruit and Cachaça) and ‘Strawberry Caipirinha’, a lighter, fruitier version of the old favourite.
Enjoy the video. (No embed code, sorry.)
Mark Tafoya of ReMARKable Palate and the Culinary Media Network is featuring cachaça (particularly Sagatiba) in a big way this week.
Check out this excellent 45-minute interview (MP3) with Jared Brown and Anastatia Miller, husband-and-wife directors of the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux and authors of the book Cachaça: The Soul Of Brazil. The guests, along with Mark, do an excellent job of dispelling a number of myths about cachaça and even explain how the caipirinha owes some of its origins to the Napoleonic Wars. (Certainly news to your humble editor.)
Enjoy Sagatiba's cocktail tutorial below, also supplied by Mark.
Now... Where can I buy this book?
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