Crash Course in Cachaça

I can remember when I had my first experience with cachaça. This was in the late seventies and I was working for a commodity-trading firm with a Brazilian subsidiary; Josco Agrícola do Brasil. We had come to Brazil to develop export markets for agricultural products that hadn’t been exported before, like dried citrus pulp.

Brazil’s orange production and orange juice production was exploding even though a lot of skeptics in Florida thought the country couldn’t become a major producer much less exporter. But after you process the orange, you have to do something with the remainder. Some was fed to cattle, especially for the baby beef for the Rubiyat restaurants but the rest was wasted. We introduced a drying and pelletizng technology and eventually exported hundreds of thousand of tons. Brazil now regularly exports a million tons and you buy “Sunshine State” orange juice in the US with the disclaimer that it contains either Brazilian or US oranges.

We wanted to develop the same high tonnage business with manioc chips, raspa da mandioca (the stuff tapioca is made from). This starchy tuber makes a wonderful animal feed and Europe annually uses about 5 million tons of the stuff. We knew how to dry and pellitize and export unusual commodities and were asked to build a plant to do so in Vinhatico in the state of Espírito Santo.

This was a poor sun baked area and this factory was a big deal in this town at the edge of the sugar cane belt. The who’s who of the state was there for the processing plant’s groundbreaking ceremony. There were 250 locals and three pale gringos (it was winter up north) from our Minnesota-based company. We said a few words in the blazing sun and then a fellow wearing a white smock came out with a tray full of shot glasses. The governor of Espírito Santo wearing an immaculate white linen suit threw his shot down and our delegation from the U.S. did the same. I thought it was rum. It was cachaça - a fermented drink made form sugar cane juice; rum is made from the molasses that is a byproduct of sugar cane processing but few people, much less dictionaries, can get the distinction.

Or as Henry Preiss who imports Ypióca, a popular brand, explained to me, ”Cachaça is distilled form of fermented sugar cane. The entire juice of the sugar cane is used… The spirit is rectified twice, distilled in five distilleries using Portuguese Colares continuous stills, and aged for six months.”

Straight cachaça gets on this autobahn to the brain. It doesn’t stop at your taste buds and linger like beer or wine; it is on a bullet train to the brain. Whoa. In my faltering portuñol, an ungracious mixture of Spanish and Portuguese, I asked “Que és isso?”

“Cachaça” came the breathless response from the slightly flushed Governor now picking up his second shot glass slightly shaking his head as if to chase away a fly.

We naturally had to follow his lead and down another toast and the second really gripped my brain. I was feeling happy but numb. I know what you are thinking. I am a milk toast gringo from Minneapolis, a place awash with 3.2 beer, and I am exaggerating the impact of my first cachaça experience to show you what a tough traveler I am. However if you look at some of the slang used to describe cachaça, you can really see that I am not such a wimp after all. To wit:

Abrideira - the opener

Água que passarinho não bebe - water that birds won’t even drink

Aguardente - burning water

Arrebenta peito - chest smasher

Assovio de Cobra - snake’s whistle

Danada - damned

Desmancha samba -samba unraveled

Engasga gato - cat choker

Já começa - it already starts

Mata bicho - beast killer

Pinga - it drops

Veneno - poison

When we got back to São Paulo that night I wandered into a store and bought a bottle to take back to the states with me. I didn’t particularly like the stuff straight and was unimaginative in figuring out what to mix it with but I wanted some of my other friends to experience this bullet train. The bottle looked like something in which you bought kerosene in the countryside, and the label looked almost hand made. Only later did I learn there were some 5,000 brands of cachaça in Brazil then but there was no thought to an export market like the one that was developing for Brazilian orange juice. I love Brazilians and their inventiveness when it came to export products but never did I think that cachaça had any future. With this one, não há jeito!

I was staying at the round Hilton in São Paulo at the time and wandered down to the bar later that evening and asked the bartender if he had cachaça. He did not, and was not apologetic about it like they sometimes are when you ask for Henessey and they only have Courvoisier.

Yuppie Cups

But from being a drink that was enjoyed by only lower economic classes several decades ago in rural areas of Brazil, it now been proudly lauded as Brazil’s national drink and being accepted abroad. To quote a New York Times headline of October 6, 2000: “A Local Liquor catches on.” The Washington Post about six months later even had an even better headline: “Brazil rediscovers Its Culture: Poor Man’s Cocktail…” [Editor’s note: BrazilMax was featured in this Washington Post article.]

The urban legend surrounding cachaça is that slaves working on the first sugar cane plantations conceived it some 400 years ago. They were allowed to capture the juice from sugar cane. The plantation owners called it Grapa Azeda, which the slaves then called cagaça, which then became cachaça. One writer notes, ”Plantation owners began to serve this liquor to their slaves after noticing its positive effects, such as increase vigor, experienced by slaves who consumed it.” I wonder if Starbucks will start selling it.

The current production of around 1.3 billion liters (somewhere around 6,000 tanker trucks) is split among 5,000 registered trademarks; the market is broken down by Cachaça 51 (32%), Pitú (32%), Velho Barreiro (12%) and Ypióca (10%). One observer points out a vast difference in prices, with Ypíoca retail prices usually four times what other brands are.

Henry Preiss notes that he has been struggling to get better brands of cachaça sold in the US. The popular Fogo de Chão restaurant chain in Brazil opened up several restaurants in the US and tried using some lower grade cachaça and saw its drink sales fall 50%. They upgraded and now hope that sales will go back up. Thus all cachaça, like all rum or scotch, is not created equal.

The February 24th issue of the influential newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo stated exports of cachaça jumped from US$7.3 million in 1999 to US$8.6 million in 2001. Insofar as exports are concerned Pitú (which goes mostly to Germany where the caipirinha is mixed as a popular “Brasilianiches Sommergetränk” – Brazilian summer drink), Cachaça 51, Velho Barreiro, Nega Fulô and Ypióca are the same in market share. The goal is to have exports reach US$100 million by the end of the decade.

It no longer has the stigma of being only something for the working class but now appeals to trendy Brazilian yuppies in Brazil and abroad; the bartender at the posh Copacabana Palace in Rio states they now mix up 200 caipirinhas a day. This cocktail of cachaça, lemon and lime juice and sugar has become the national mixed drink of Brazil much like the mojito has in Cuba, the mint julep is at the Kentucky Derby and sangria is in Spain. Drinks International magazine ranks cachaça as one of the five most consumed distilled liquors in the world. In most bars in Brazil and now increasingly in the larger US cities like New York, San Francisco and Miami you can ask for a caipirinha and the bartender would know what you are talking about.

Brazilian producers want to make cachaça as popular worldwide as tequila, says Maria das Vitórias Cavalcanti, director of ABRABE, the Brazilian Beverage Manufactures Association. “As a result of the hard work, the Brazilian drink is already hitting the consumers in a distinguished high level position, sometimes compared to a fine whisky, always bearing a positive image linked with everything related to the exotic Brazilian carnival and folklore,” she says. The new Ypióca bottle is an example of this for the label features a pensive fellow looking into his glass while the bottle is wrapped in tropical straw.

Connoisseurs of all types have caught on and are “intellectualizing“ cachaça much like Russians ponder the Zen of vodka, the English gin and the Scottish single malt whisky. The Wine Enthusiast wrote this about Ypióca 86: ”It has a fruity nose that also displays paraffin notes. The body is medium and the palate bears a peppery quality that interplays well with the almost glaze like fruitiness. The finish is medium.”

But along with the good reviews came the bad. Listen to Internet drink guru Daniel Rogov: “Starting about two years ago after becoming bored with grappa, the beautiful people of North America adopted cachaça as their new beverage. Unlike most of the hundreds of millions of bottles consumed in Brazil two of the most popular brands being exported are Cachaça 51 and Pitú… both leave a stinging sensation in the mouth an throat. I find the Cachaça 51 so coarse and burning that if I had to compare it anything at all it would be kerosene. Pitú much to its credit actually has a discernible flavor perhaps of anise and is considerably smoother.”

And this is what the wine critic of the Oregonian wrote, ”Cachaça 51 tastes like a blend of tequila and rum and packs the characteristic kick attributed to the two. This is not a drink of nuance and subtly; it has nevertheless its plainspoken elegance.”

While Ypióca was the first cachaça to be aged in Brazil and thus tripled its export volume to the states, Nega Fulô is almost handcrafted and aged in oak and balm casks. Currently 90% of Nega Fulô is dedicated to export markets. One of the partners in its production, Vicente Bastos, stated, “We need to recognize cachaça as the ‘official’ Brazilian drink and make sure it is served at all government ceremonies.” He advocates a branding campaign similar to the one Mexico developed for tequila. It would include a diplomatic effort to ensure that the name cachaça is applied only to Brazilian products (this is not far fetched Chile and Peru are at odds as to who produces “real” pisco).

ABRABE is spending some US $4million over the next three years to organize the industry. The association also wants to bring the smaller distillers to international trade shows and to increase exports about 30 a year to over US$100 million over the next ten years.

There are so many plans surrounding cachaça it is hard to keep up with them. One involves declaring June 12 the International Day of Cachaça because on June 12, 1744 Portugal prohibited the production and distribution of cachaça.

Finally, to close this essay, a couple of recipes:

Caipirinha (little peasant girl): two fresh limes, grated and squeezed; two tablespoons of sugar, one cup of cachaça, one cup of crushed ice. Combine sugar, grated lime peel and lime juice. Add cachaça and pour into glass filled with ice.

Rabo de Galo (rooster’s tail): Combine 2/3 cachaça and 1/3 Cinzano. Ice is optional.

John Freivalds is Managing Director of JFA, an international marketing communications firm. He is also publisher of the soon to be released Periodic Table of Toast which details 40 of the world's most popular beverages and the word for toast in that country. His essay Samba de Transit Lounge also appeared in BrazilMax.