Cachaçagora - Cachaça, Caipirinha, And Cocktails

From the "What's the Point?" Department

An entertaining interview with Jimmy Zanon of Denver's Lola:

What is the weirdest drink someone has asked you to make?

Virgin caiparinha [sic]. I think a lot of people don't get that the spirit in a cocktail is there for a reason and is an integral part of the drink. Without the cachaca, a caiparinha is just lime and sugar, and doesn't make for a very good non-alcoholic drink.

Pssst... Hey... Wanna Buy A Cachaça Distillery, Farm?

Photo Credit: Souza Tassini Imoveis

There's one on the market, with a Web site to match:

An artisanal cachaça distillery, selling for R$1.5 million [USD$795,335 according to Google at the time of this writing] with about a hundred and twenty thousand liters worth of top notch Brazilian cachaça waiting in storage tanks ready to be bottled and labled on site and sent to market to be sold alongside the best of Brazil.  The property is located in a beautiful tourist region and includes roughly 13 hectares or about 30 acres of production land, sugar cane crops, and a beautiful owner’s home.

Cuca Fresca Mixology Contest, Win A Trip To Brazil

Think you can come up with a great cocktail using Cuca Fresca Premium or Cuca Fresca Gold? Well, it could be worth a trip to Brazil and a tour of Cuca Fresca's distillery. 

The rules are simple: You are allowed four additional ingredients besides the Cuca Fresca to work with. One catch: You have to be a professional bartender and your drink must be on the menu at the restaurant/bar where you work to qualify for the Peoples' Choice award. (Your humble author, therefore, does not qualify.)

From the announcement earlier this month, here are the important deadlines:

• July 1-Sept. 15: Recipe submissions can be made via CucaFrescaSpirit.com
• July 22-Oct. 31: People can cast their votes at CucaFrescaSpirit.com for the “People’s Choice” finalist. 
• Oct. 15: Twenty semi-finalists will be chosen by the judges and will be promoted on the Cuca Fresca website for two weeks. 
• Nov. 1: Four finalists will be announced on and will compete live at the end of November. The Peoples' Choice winner will be announced at that time.

Good luck!

UPDATE (2009-07-21): Clarifications supplied by CF's Phoenix Kelly-Rappa in boldface italics.

June 12 Is International Cachaça Day

Photo Credit: Mantelli

Think of it as just like the American Repeal Day, just with a longer and likely bloodier history.

The folks at Cabana described International Cachaça Day in their pitch as:

International Cachaça Day was started by Sociedade Brasileira da Cachaça, a Brasilian government organization. It was created to commemorate June 12th, 1744: the day when Portugal, then the colonial authority in Brasil, outlawed the production and selling of cachaça.

Cabana, Leblon, and Boca Loca are all over this.

First, three restaurants in Chicago (and presumably elsewhere) will be pouring specialty drinks featuring Cabana. The most interesting of these is the Tropical Caipirinha, served at The Signature Room (875 N. Michigan Ave.).

Tropical Caipirinha

• 1.5oz Cabana Cachaça
• ½ oz simple syrup (1/2 shot)
• 3 oz lychee puree
• Splash of soda water

There's also going to be a tasting event at UnCork It (393 E Illinois Street) from 5-8pm. Leticia and I will probably be there, then bounce across the street for dinner at Niu and then Terminator: Salvation at the AMC. 

(For those of you about to jump all over me for taking my pregnant wife to a spirits tasting followed by sushi... Drop dead. She doesn't drink and we don't touch the raw fish.) 

Boca Loca, true to form, is working with leading mixologists to help us all get out of the caipirinha rut. Here's one from longtime Boca Loca collaborator Jeffrey Morgenthaler (interviewed last year) who, in addition to his masterful mixology skills, probably comes up with the best names for drinks:

Border Agitation

• 1.5 oz Boca Loca Cachaça
• 0.75 oz fresh lemon juice
• 0.5 oz simple syrup
• 0.5 oz egg white
• 2 tsp pepper jelly
• Bitter lemon soda 

Shake ingredients with ice until well chilled. Double-strain into a
Collins glass over ice. Top with 2 oz bitter lemon soda.

Leblon makes the argument that, in some ways, cachaça is still held captive. This time, the antagonists are not Portuguese colonists but American regulators, who insist that the third-most-distilled spirit in the world be labeled "Brazilian Rum" here in the states. 

Oh, how my devout Libertarian soul shudders at the Nanny State reality of it all...

Finally, here are some related posts from around the Web, most with recipes:

• A Muddled Thought: "Okay so what does this mean? Well first of all it’s an excuse to make cocktails using cachaça."
• Republic of Rum: "The Brazilian Association of Spirits (ABRABE) reports that Brazil produces some 4,000 brands of cachaça, totaling a billion liters each year."
• Nightclub & Bar: "Operators looking for an edge are increasing their cachaça and Caipirinha load — not easy, as few of the new brands are available nationally. The Sunset Lounge at the Mondrian Hotel in Miami Beach offers nearly 50 cachaças and a selection of Caipirinhas infused with flavors such as lychee-elderflower and peach-lemongrass." 
• SFGate: "[The Cantina in San Francisco] already carries at least 27 versions of Brazil's national spirit, which is made from distilled cane juice and used in the caipirinha. On Thursday, it will offer a menu of harder-to-find cachaças such as Weber Haus, which won the Best White Spirit award at the recent San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and Armazem Vieira. Owner Duggan McDonnell is creating a menu of creative cachaça cocktails, and of course there will be caipirinhas and a Brazil-themed DJ." 
• Metromix New York: "And so, bars and restaurants around the [NYC] have put together their finest cachaça-based drinks for your enjoyment, all day." 

Tech Venture Firm Takes Stake In Beija

How rare it is that I get to combine two of my favorite things: high-tech and cachaça. Hell... All I need is for Type O Negative to sing a song about it and I'll have a Phil Gomes hobby hat-trick.

Blue Caterpillar LLC, an tech investment and advisory firm, has invested in Beija. Their assessment of the opportunity certainly echoes the opinions stated here on Cachacagora, namely, that very little cachaça makes it out of Brazil and folks up in this hemisphere are eager to try something new.

More from Blue Caterpillar:

Beija doesn’t have to be the worlds [sic] leading brand to offer attractive investment returns.  The global liquor market is dominated by a number of large conglomerates like Brown-Forman (NYSE: BF.A, $49, $7B Cap), Fortune Brands (NYSE: FO, $36, $5.5B Cap), Diageo (NYSE: DEO, $54, $33B Cap), LVMH, and Bacardi among others.  They will all end up having their own brands of cachaça as the market develops.  Many will also have multiple positions with “super premium,” “premium” and “superior” labels to address the market opportunity.

Our assessment is that Beija has the right ingredients to make it in the market.  The valuation parameters are in line with the stage of company development and potential valuations in this market are easy to calculate since they are largely driven by case volume.

While I can't find evidence that Bacardi acquired Leblon, as the post says in another paragraph, I do know that it took a minority stake in the company. When Blue Caterpillar says that Bacardi "acquired a small local producer," they might be referring to Leblon's purchase of the distillery that became Maison Leblon in Minas Gerais.

Beija, rated 3.5 barrels here, took third in the post-New-Year's blind tasting that my buddy Richard and I undertook. This, of course, should not be taken to mean that Beija is at all inferior; the competition in that particular tasting was unusually fierce. I also linked to an early profile of the young founders, which ran on WestonForum.Com.

Tony Abou-Ganim On Cachaça

The Authentic Bartender points us to Nightclub & Bar's interview with mixology legend Tony Abou-Ganim, whom Leblon was kind enough to introduce me to last year.

A highlight from the NCB interview:

NCB: What are some of the dos and don’ts of working with cachaça?

Abou-Ganim: My biggest do is to keep it simple. Choose ingredients that complement the flavor of the particular cachaça. To me, with that floral, earthy element, cachaça can be both rugged and refined, masculine but gentlemanly. It lends itself to fresh, tropical fruits and an array of citrus.

You don’t want to mask it with artificial flavors, mixes and syrups. When I think of cachaça and modifiers, I think of things like Cointreau, with its bitter and orange peels, or Domaine de Canton, which will complement the earthiness, or floral liqueurs like St-Germain that complement that floral-citrus element. Parfait Amour, with its violet and vanilla, is another nice one. It’s important to think of liqueurs that will complement without overpowering.

Here's one of Tony's cachaca-based recipes

Desert Rose

• 1 ½ ounce Leblon cachaça
• 1 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1 ounce fresh tangerine juice
• 1 ounce homemade hibiscus syrup
• Chilled soda water

Shake Leblon, hibiscus syrup, fresh lemon and tangerine juices; strain into an ice-filled Collins glass. Spritz with chilled soda water. Stir and garnish with an edible flower.

For hibiscus syrup: Bring 2 parts water to boil, add 2 parts sugar; dissolve and add 1 part dried hibiscus flowers. Simmer for 15 minutes. Take off heat and let cool.

WSJ On "Vodka's Decline"

Like I've said before, vodka distillers have an odd dilemma: The degree to which their product has been valued for the past decade or more is the degree to which bar patrons perceive it as able to "disappear" into a cheap, mass-produced juice product.

This, of course, is meagre gruel with which to sustain a trend and, as such, The Wall Street Journal has identified what it feels as "A Welcome Sign Of Vodka's Decline".

From the article:

But the popularity of vodka among foodies was always perplexing. Vodka's neutrality and uniformity would seem to be at odds with the slow-food crowd's embrace of robust flavors reflecting specific locales. Back in 2005, among the best bartenders, the revolt against vodka had begun, even if it was still too underground to be seen in Food & Wine's cocktail compilation. But now, at long last, as a revolutionary theorist might put it, the contradictions inherent in the vodka paradigm have become apparent. It's as though there were finally the realization that making cocktails with vodka is like making paella with instant rice -- it can be done, of course, but it doesn't exactly burnish one's culinary bona fides.

Out of hand, I tend to reject the media's tendency to demonstrate the success of one thing as having necessarily occurred at the expense of something else -- vodka will continue to be an extremely popular spirit category and will never go away. A world without Hangar One, for example, is almost too terrible to comprehend.

Then again, the amount of alcohol that one can consume in, say, a given year is fairly finite, the habits of my favorite musicians notwithstanding. If vodka is indeed declining after a period of heightened popularity, other spirit categories have a chance to shine.

Considering the increasing popularity of Brazilian culture in the northern hemisphere, the greater global attention on Brazil as a member of the BRIC countries, and a clear trend toward well-crafted cocktails, could it be said that we spirits aficionados are living in cachaça's moment? 

Never mind the fact that, even with an unusual amount of help, the word caipirinha is difficult for most Americans to pronounce. The fact is that people are yearning for something new... and cachaça is particularly well-positioned.

Seagram's Responds: More Details On Their "Brazilian Rum"

Earlier this week, I wondered whether Seagram's launch of a "Brazilian Rum" was a tactic for marketing cachaça by a name that everyone already knew how to pronounce. My instincts said "no", but I just wanted to make sure.

Here's what Shawn Kelley of Pernod-Ricard (owners of Seagram's) had to say:

Seagram’s Rum is Brazilian rum made from sugar cane juice.

Made in Brazil? From sugarcane juice? Don't get your hopes up...

Our rum is a blend of pot still and column still rum that is distilled at a minimum of 55% ABV.

Therefore, not cachaça. After all, as Ed Hamilton at the Ministry of Rum tells us, "By law, cachaça must be distilled to between 38 and 48% ABV."

Our goal is to launch a rum from Seagram’s that appeals to everyone but has a point of differentiation (Brazilian origin) vs. cachaça, a smaller niche category still building momentum in the US.

As I figured, the situation isn't that Seagram's is marketing cachaça under a banner that's easier for the mass market to understand. Rather, Seagram's Brazilian Rum is simply not a cachaça at all, despite its origins and what it's made from. And companies like Seagram's are certainly not interested in "niche' categories.

Shawn assures that the plant is located in Brazil and is fully owned by Seagram's. The sugar cane, however, is sourced from different farm suppliers.

Seagram's Launches "Brazilian Rum", Questions Remain

Caught this by way of Ministry of Rum and Examiner:

Over at the latter, Charles Cowdery says:

In addition to traditional rum cocktails such as rum and cola, and the mojito, the brand will promote the caipirinha, a traditional Brazilian drink made with cachaça.

Is Seagram's Brazilian Rum, in fact, cachaça? I don't know, but cachaça probably can be classified as rum under U.S. law.

The suggested retail price is $11.99 for a 750 ml bottle.

Cachaça is, in fact, "classified as rum under U.S. law". There probably is a reason for it, but it looks to me that it's just some bureaucrat, or set thereof, flexing muscle.

The questions I'm asking:

• Is this actually a "cachaça", as we've come to understand the term? (My strong sense is "no".)
• If so, is it evidence that marketers may be giving up on marketing "cachaça" as its own category, by calling it "Brazilian Rum?"

I asked Seagram's U.S. PR. I let you know if I hear back.

UPDATE: Seagram's got back to me.

Cheers Magazine On Cachaça

Cuca Fresca's Phoenix Kelly-Rappa sent over this article from Cheers Magazine, wherein cachaça is positioned as an emerging spirit in a world where "vodka is the next vodka."

Akin to rum is Brazil’s sexy native spirit, cachaça, which is distilled from unrefined sugar cane juice. Cachaça grew 240 percent since 2002 to reach 80,000 cases, according to [Beverage Information Group's manager of information services Eric] Schmidt, who analyzed data from the Brazilian government and suppliers. “It should break 100,000 cases this year,” he projects, noting that cachaça is the third largest spirit worldwide.

“Cachaça will benefit from the equity cocktail, the Caipirinha, much the way light rums are benefiting from the Mojito,” observes Ryan Magarian, founder of drinks consultancy Liquid Relations in Portland, Ore. “But the spirit is a bit raw, so it’s not for sipping.”

"Not for sipping?" Uhhh... Who says?

Frankly, this goes to show how far the experts in the beverage industry need to go. Cachaça's reputation as a strong, rough, cheap form of cane-based Brazilian moonshine is way out-of-date.

While it can be argued that white cachacas are generally not for sipping, this too is a conventional wisdom that I completely deny. After all, the first five-barrel cachaça that I'll be sharing with you all is a white cachaça.