The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of cachaça

cachaça , otherwise known as pinga (among many other names), is a sugar-cane-based spirit made in Brazil and is among the world’s leading spirits in production volume, with between 1 billion and 1.4 billion liters a year being made, almost entirely for the domestic market. In 2001, the Brazilian government formally specified that it must be made from pure sugar-cane juice, as is modern practice, and has been petitioning the World Trade Organization to recognize it as an exclusively Brazilian product due to its historical and cultural roots in that country. While those roots are undeniably deep, cachaça was historically also made from molasses and the skimmings from sugar refining. Indeed, in Brazil cachaça (a Portuguese word for grape pomace) was originally a term for those skimmings, which were fermented and drunk (as garapa). See skimmings. The name, therefore, demonstrates how early Portuguese colonists in Brazil applied Old World mental models to describe New World products.

It has been posited that Brazilian cachaça was the earliest form of sugar-cane-based spirit made in the New World. Is it, in fact, the first rum? Historians have speculated about the origins of New World rum making and often assume that it emerged immediately alongside sugar production. Staking claim to the origins of rum making carries a strong sense of nationalistic pride, and Brazilian claims are steeped in this nationalism. Much of the confusion surrounding the origin of New World rum making stems from the gradual evolution of rum prototypes, fermented sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverages, such as garapa, that were produced on a small scale in the early years of colonization, and from the almost parallel ascent of rum distilling in the different parts of the Americas in the seventeenth century.

Brazil developed a highly productive sugar industry in the sixteenth century, beginning in the 1530s with large engenhos, or sugar works, in the south; by the 1570s, the center of the industry had moved to Pernambuco in the north. It has been claimed that distillation began with the founding of the engenhos, as a byproduct of sugar making. But while the Portuguese had certainly already encountered sugar-cane spirits in northern India (where they are attested to in the Delhi Sultanate in the late 1200s) and had plenty of general experience with distillation both at home and on the Portuguese island of Madeira, what textual evidence exists for them in sixteenth-century Brazil is weak and confused, while the known archaeological evidence is nonexistent. In 1587, Gabriel Soares de Sousa recorded the presence of numerous large sugar factories and eight smaller syrup factories in the Rencôncavo region of Bahia, but his detailed account of the industry made no specific references to alcohol production in them. Nor is there any mention of alembics or tools necessary for distillation in the extensive sixteenth-century records of the large Sergipe plantation, one of the most productive sugar factories in the Rencôncavo. Distillers are not listed among the artisans at engenho Sergipe, and the earliest reference to an “alambique” there appears in 1651, although by 1622–1623 there is a record of the enslaved workers being given “aguardente” (it is not impossible that that was a Portuguese wine-based product, although a local cane one is far more likely). Without further archaeological research, we must conclude that if cachaça was produced in Brazil in the sixteenth century, the industry was small and limited to meeting the demands of the local population.

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For much of its history cachaça’s reputation was as a cheap firewater suitable only for peasants and the enslaved. By the early nineteenth century, however, Brazilian distillers had considerable experience with the spirit, and the Rev. Robert Walsh, encountering it in 1828, albeit pronouncing it “an inferior kind of rum,” also conceded that it was “cheap and accessible” and “not … an unwholesome or unpalatable liquor.” In 1869, the explorer Richard Burton went further and provided a taxonomy of Brazilian cane spirits, reserving “cachaça” for the lowest grade, made from molasses. Above it, he ranked “caninha” (still a popular nickname for the spirit), which was made from cane juice, and finally there were “restilo” and “lavado,” which were redistilled to higher strengths.

The rise of the Brazilian coffee industry in the late nineteenth century drew energy and investment from the sugar industry, which shrank to the point that it cut off the supply of molasses for distillation. From the end of the century, cachaça became exclusively a sugar-cane-juice spirit. By this point, it had become an essential, if complicated, icon of Brazilian identity, both loved for its deep traditions and scorned for its perceived rusticity and backwardness.

At present, there are thousands of distilleries in Brazil that produce cachaça. No accurate count can be supplied, as the vast majority of them are semi-legal at best: small-volume backwoods operations that refill customers’ bottles straight from the still. Commercial cachaça comes in two unofficial grades, industrial and artisanal. The former, whose manufacture is centered in the northeast, is made on a huge scale in modern column stills. Many of these distilleries also further refine their spirit into ethanol for motor fuel. Industrial cachaça is extremely cheap and ranges in quality from raw and fiery, with a strong hogo, to reasonably smooth and pleasant. See hogo.

Artisanal cachaça, a small but growing part of the market, is made in pot stills (often traditional Portuguese-style ones, with water-cooled heads that allow a single distillation to proof). Fermentation with ambient yeasts is common, as is (in some regions) the addition of a little maize to help with fermentation. At its best, it is a subtle, soft, and even lovely expression of the cane it is made from.

Most cachaça, artisanal or industrial, is rested in either stainless steel or neutral wood containers before bottling. Many artisanal cachaças, and a few industrial ones, are also aged in reactive wood for anywhere from a year to twelve years. The barrels used are often (imported) oak ones, but a wide variety of Brazilian hardwoods are also commonly used, including amburana, jequitiba, ipê, and a number of others. Some of these are fairly neutral, but others impart strong flavors and even unusual colors to the spirit. Amburana, for instance, gives a strong black-cherry note to cachaça aged in it.

By Brazilian law cachaça must be between 38 and 48 percent alcohol by volume. Other legal definitions include: adoçada (sweetened) (6–30 g/L sugar concentration); envelhecida (minimum 50 percent wooden-aged cachaça); premium (100 percent wood-aged cachaça); extra premium (at least three-year 100 percent wooden-aged cachaça). There are currently three officially recognized indications of origin for cachaça, including Paraty (Rio de Janeiro), Salinas (Minas Gerais), and Abaíra (Bahia).

Cachaça is the base spirit in a number of uniquely Brazilian drinks. Most of these are of fairly recent origin: as Burton noted, the Brazilians had a long-standing “prejudice against mixing” cachaça into punches and the other common mixed drinks of the Americas. Only in the twentieth century did that prejudice ease, helped by the rise of the batida, wherein cachaça is shaken or beaten together with sugar, fruit juices, and other ingredients. The most popular of these, the Batida Paulista, is better known by its alternate name, the Caipirinha, a drink that made it onto the global stage in the 1970s, by which point cachaça was suffering from one of its periodic bouts of unfashionableness in Brazil. See Caipirinha. That unfashionableness is passing now, and with the global mixology craze, Brazilian bartenders are turning to it to create a local take on the art.

cachaça

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