Cachaçagora - Cachaça, Caipirinha, And Cocktails

Booze Muse On The State Of Cachaça In The U.S.

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.”

In addition to Leblon's Luttmann, the piece quotes representatives from Cabana, Ypióca, Sagatiba, and Beleza Pura.

Cachaçagora: A Half-Year In Review, Looking Toward 2009

I'm a little more than six months into the grand public experiment I call Cachaçagora. I figure that it might be of interest to my readers if I share what I've observed this far.

Search Matters

Relative search volume for "cachaca" or "cachaça" in the United States, 2004 - 2008. Source: Google Insights for Search

Bartenders, look at the chart above. Your customers are searching for cachaça more now than in the past five years.

Another look at the chart shows that, in terms of U.S. search trends, the online interest in cachaça is at an all-time seasonal high. In fact, the trough of the seasonal search trend is about as high as the peak for past years, as the red line indicates.

It's fair to say that the degree to which people are inspired to search for something is the degree to which they're interested in something. If your bar hasn't started stocking cachaça and you haven't learned how to make a few cocktails with it, the time is now.

(And I happen to know of a site that does an okay job of tracking these things. Jus' sayin'...)

Brands Matter

The importance of brands has made itself known in my Google Analytics account, which I use to divine online cachaça interest by way of accesses to this site.

Half of the top ten search terms that people used to get to Cachaçagora were brands: Abelha (my first scoop!), Cabana, Leblon, Sagatiba, and Ypióca.

Six out of Cachaçagora's top ten most-accessed pages (not including the home page) featured brands: The category pages for Leblon, Sagatiba, and Ypióca, plus the reviews for Leblon, Sagatiba Pura, and Ypióca 160.

Personality Matters

The all-time most popular Cachaçagora post in a single day was the interview with Jeffrey Morgenthaler. This shouldn't be a surprise, really. In fact, to tell you the truth, it tells me that Cachaçagora has been a lot of "inside baseball" up to this point — I should really be interviewing more bartenders and sharing their experiences. (My wonderful graphic-designer wife has made some nifty leave-behind cards, which I plan on depositing on bartenders both in Chicago and around the world.)

Moving Forward

So, all of this gives me some ideas for what you can expect from Cachaçagora in 2009:

• If you are a bartender doing interesting things with cachaça, I want to hear from you. So do my readers. All that I ask is that you disclose any affiliations or brand relationships you may have.
• Look forward to more reviews as new products come out and I discover older ones. I've got at least five in draft form as I write this.
• As this site gets bigger, trying to navigate via the category links becomes less and less effective. So I've installed a Google Custom Search box for Cachaçagora in the right-hand margin.
• Going to try to get more updates from the in-laws in Rio. After all, my father-in-law's reaction to the first blind tasting got more play than the tasting itself!

Wishing all of you a great 2009!

Brazil Tries American-style Neoprohibition, Masters American-style Failure of Same

Photo Credit: Flickr User Ludmila Tavares

Brazil.

It is the home of Carnival. The country makes 1.3 billion liters of cachaça every year... and drinks about 99.5% of it. (The other 0.5% is on my kitchen counter, I swear to God.) As I figured out on the back of a cocktail napkin, that works out to approximately 6.79 liters per annum for every man, woman, and child in the country. Throw a rock in Minas Gerais and you'll hit at least three or four cachaça distilleries. And, oh, did I mention Carnival?

Anyway... So what am I to think of the positively draconian alcohol laws that are in force there?

From the WaPo:

Anyone caught driving with a blood alcohol content [BAC] of .02 percent or higher (compared with .08 in the United States) faces a $400 fine, loss of their license for a year, an impounded vehicle and jail time.

I'm pretty sure that a BAC of 0.02% is pretty close to what you can get from breath spray or maybe two or three bourbon balls at a family Christmas dinner, but don't take my word for it.

You'd have to drink an awful lot of cachaça — or be a bureaucratic government regulatroid — to be so impaired that you couldn't figure out what has happened since:

The statistics suggest the roads are no safer than before. In the law's first five months, the number of car accidents on federal highways in Rio de Janeiro state rose 17 percent, compared with the same period in the previous year. Injuries also rose, by 32 percent, although deaths fell by 8 percent, according to police.

Across the country, the picture appeared worse. In those five months, accidents, injuries and deaths on federal highways increased over the previous five months.

The problem, the government of course claims, is that there just aren't enough breathalyzers for the task. The entire state of Rio de Janeiro only has 13 such devices, according to the article.

Syndicated columnist David Harsanyi, author of the excellent book Nanny State, put this kind of neoprohibition into the proper perspective over at Reason:

A BAC test, one of the main tools used by law enforcement to catch drunk drivers, determines how much alcohol is present in the bloodstream. A BAC of 0.08 percent, for instance, means 0.0008 of your blood is alcohol. At that level, though, you're hardly slurring your words or staggering.

In 2000 President Clinton signed a federal law aimed at pressuring states to lower their BAC [Blood Alcohol Content] limits from 0.1 percent to 0.08 percent. States that didn't go along were threatened with the loss of federal highway funds. Karolyn Nunnallee, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), predicted that a nationwide 0.08 percent standard "will save nearly 600 lives every year."

It hasn't worked out that way. In the July 2007 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy, Sam Houston State University economist Donald Freeman examines the most recent data available and concludes "there's no evidence that lowering the BAC limits...reduced fatality rates, either in total or in crashes likely to be alcohol related." This is true, he found, both in states that adopted a 0.08 percent BAC standard on their own and in states that did so under federal pressure.

I humbly ask that my readers and all cachaça consumers enjoy our favorite spirit responsibly.

I also ask that lawmakers exercise a shot-glass worth of common sense.

Which of the two do you think is more likely?

Ronald Reagan was right: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

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.

Call It "Çeasonality"

Awhile back, in my first State Of The Spirit post, I posted my first graph highlighting searches for "cachaça" in the U.S.

Here's an update, just to cap off the seasonal trend.

Basically, you can count on interest in cachaça to peak in early-to-mid July and taper off sharply as the summer ends.

Leads me to think about how cachaça marketers can think about evening out the peaks-and-valleys a bit.

Here's one idea: coffee drinks using aged cachaças.

Aimee over at Sagatiba's comms firm thoughtfully sent over some airplane bottles of Sagatiba Velha, the U.S. introduction of which was leaked some time ago. The press materials included the recipe for the Velha Espresso:

Velha Espresso

• 1.5 ounces Sagatiba Velha
• 3/4 ounce of Tousaint coffee liqueur or Kahlua especial black label
• Single or double shot of espresso
• Dash of simple syrup

Add Sagatiba, coffee liqueur and espresso to a cocktail shaker. Shake vigorously to make foam. Pour into a frozen martini glass. Float three coffee beans in the foam.

It'll be interesting to see if cachaça marketers similarly expand the nature of their recommended recipes.

U.S. Cachaça Marketing: The Long Road Ahead

My day job often requires that I travel a lot around the U.S. and sometimes internationally. This means I go to a number of restaurants. Some of these restaurants have bars. Some of these bars have cachaça.

Some don't know they have it. Some had it at one time and stopped carrying it.

A guy I know at Reuters once told me that newsrooms often follow a "three's a trend" rule. That is, if something happens three or more times, it's therefore okay (at least journalistically) to call it a "trend".

Just to be safe — and hedging for the fact that I'd never call myself a "journalist" — here are four stories that should alarm your favorite cachaça brands.

A while ago, in Chicago, the waitress told me when I sat down that the restaurant didn't have cachaça. She was surprised after the meal when I pointed out that they actually offered no fewer than two cachaças on the dessert menu. (They thoughtfully comped me on the cachaça as a reward for catching the oversight.)

In a Manhattan hotel bar, the bartender was equally surprised when, after telling me they absolutely did not carry cachaça, I calmly pointed to the bottle behind the bar to show her where it was. Then she remembered that the brand actually held a pretty big bash at the bar's opening. That was kind of like remembering that great Super Bowl ad but forgetting the name of the sponsor.

During another trip to Manhattan, this time near the Financial District, the waitress couldn't name the brand of cachaça that the bar was carrying when I ordered a caipirinha. (Update: My wife reminded me that, in fact, I originally asked the waitress what brand of cachaça they used in their caipirinhas. The waitress actually said they didn't carry cachaça! This led me to ask what she thought the caipirinha was made from.) I'm pretty certain she'd have been able to rattle off every whiskey, vodka, and tequila, though.

This past Saturday, at a swank Patrick-Bateman-would-eat-here Asian fusion restaurant during BlogOrlando, the bartender told me that they didn't carry cachaça. "It just didn't sell," she told me.

"It just didn't sell?" In Orlando, for Pete's sake! Sure, it's probably not even close to Miami in terms of its Brazilian immigrant population, but even a Google search of local Brazilian-owned-and-related businesses would indicate that there's likely a decently sized community there.

All of this should greatly disturb more than a few cachaça marketers who read this blog. It's also not such good news for those of us who'd like cachaça to be as available as vodka or tequila.

We've seen the ads. We've seen the onanistically conceived web sites. We've seen the viral videos that brands hope will go viral. For all that, though, cachaça simply won't be successful in the U.S. until brands take the time to educate every step of the product's delivery to consumers both current and wished-for.

Photo Credit: "Confusion!" by LuluP

Cachaça's Rising Interest In The U.S.

Playing around with Google Search Insights, I wanted to see what I could divine about cachaça interest in the U.S.

Above, you see a normalized-to-100 graph of searches in the U.S. for "cachaça". Clearly an upward, seasonal trend over the past four years, with a significant spike this year.

The truly cool thing about this Google trick is that you can download the results into a spreadsheet and play with the data a little in Excel. The red line is a 14-period moving average of the search behavior, to make the chart a little easier to look at and derive meaning from.

Picked a heckuva time to start this little project, eh?

The picture gets even more interesting when you see what people are searching for and from where. More after the jump.