Step away from the lime, sir...

Cachaça is a must-stock for any serious bar, but isn’t it time to move the spirit away from making endless caipirinhas? Nushi Surtani packs her G-string and sambas off to São Paulo to find out what the boys from Brazil do with their national spirit

I am going to die in this car,’ I thought as I sat, for the third hour now, in the flourescent Obvio that was slowly sinking in the traffic. We are in São Paulo, Brazil’s commercial capital, and those dreamy stereotypes of soccer and samba, capoeira and carnivals are nowhere to be seen. Maybe they got stuck in traffic.

Just like its country, Brazil’s national drink cachaça is shrouded in stereoytpes. Popular imagination will tell you cachaça is the common man’s drink in Brazil, slowly sipped on a farmyard veranda in the hands of a rural cattle farmer. It will also say that in the mixology world, cachaça is lost without the caipirinha, the sugar and lime cocktail that put the spirit on the map and is now part of the international cocktail elite.

Caipirinha myths

The reality, however, is very different. Brazilians don’t sip cachaça – they guzzle it by the gallon in shots and slammers in the dives that dot Brazil’s colossal cities. The drink is also moving in circles of higher society now – it is most often seen in upmarket bars, clubs and hotels as tourists, who have discovered it in the West, are demanding it in its natural habitat.

The idea that cachaça is locked to the caipirinha is just as much of a myth. It is true that the caipirinha popularised cachaça outside its home, starting with Brazilians living in Germany, then spreading to drinkers in Southern Europe and the UK, the US and Australia. It is also true that many drinkers would happily order five rounds of caipirinhas on a night out in a London style bar, entirely oblivious to the fact that it is cachaça inside their drink and clueless about its origins.

Age-old cachaça brand Ypióca is more than aware of cachaça’s relative anonymity. ‘Cachaça is the national drink of a big, well-known and liked Latin American country just like tequila. Yet tequila gained fame because of the shooters craze. We can’t market drinks in this way anymore, so we have to grow the cachaça category more slowly,’ Christian Castren from Ypióca Brazil tells me.

Sagatiba has caught onto the tequila story too, and is even currently running a tequila-esque lick, shoot and suck supermarket sampling promotion in São Paulo with strawberries, paprika, sugar and cachaça. The brand’s aim is to create a new ritual around cachaça. Disbelief was roused when I mentioned such a campaign would not be allowed in the UK.

The issue facing cachaça is that, outside Brazil, its experience is the opposite of tequila’s: the cocktail came before the neat spirit and now it is finding it hard to make a name for itself beyond the caipirinha.

There’s a paradox that, while a capirinha remains the easiest and most straightforward way to sell cachaça, if the category is to grow, innovation is needed, and producers will need to make the bold decision to cut the caipirinha cord.

It’s not quite so mad as it sounds. The batida is the obvious next step. Batidas are fruit cachaça cocktails, most often made with passionfruit or coconut. But more recently, strawberries, açaí, mango, berries, kiwi or the exotic kaju (the fruit of the cashew) have also started working their way into batidas.

‘Just about any fruit works well with cachaça,’ says Chris Maxwell, general manager of London Brazilian bar Guanabara. London cachaçaria Las Iguanas even makes a ‘Ginger Batida’, with lemon, honey, pineapple and the signature ingredient, root ginger.

Reinventing cachaca

Even here, however, the caipirinha is still lurking in the background. The only way to explain batidas is to call them fruit caipirinhas, which downplays them.

A bolder step would be to take cachaça and remove it entirely from the caipirinha corner, opening it up to the world. ‘Take your most successful cocktail and put a twist on it with cachaça,’ says Scott-Anthony Lyth, business development manager for Global Brands, Ypióca’s UK distributor. ‘Many bars in Brazil and Brazilian-themed bars in the UK make classics with cachaça; some even capitalise on the mojito craze with a cachaça mojito.’

However, the true innovation lies in drinks that pair cachaça with unexpected mixers and ingredients. Astor bar in São Paulo proudly serves The Wallpaper (named after the UK magazine) which includes mango, vanilla sugar and chilli (see left); while elderflower, apple and green tea are some of the substances that have added to the breadth of cachaça cocktails poured in London. However, if it’s true invention you’re after, mixing it with other spirits is the way to go.

Many shudder at this thought. But cachaca’s blood relative, rum, is now seen as a plausible complement to other spirits, so why should cachaça be any different?

In one bar, tucked away on a cobbled street in north Brazil’s Salvador, the Italian-trained owner makes a cocktail with cachaça, tangerines and cognac. ‘I only add a hint of cognac,’ he says. ‘It’s mostly for the smell. But because cachaça is not too strong, the cognac comes out even stronger.’

Guanabara’s Maxwell takes this even further and makes a drink he calls Lapa Arches – cognac, cachaça, gomme, lime juice and berries. He also makes a long island ice tea-style drink with cachaça, rum, vodka, triple sec, gin, lime, gomme and guarana.

Liqueurs with cachaça are gaining ground too: Ypióca’s Lyth also tends bar at Mokoko in St Albans, where he pours the cachaça with Chambord and Licor 43. Meanwhile at London’s All Star Lanes, the head barman has invented a popular but closely-guarded recipe for a cachaça and absinthe cocktail.

Drinks like these strike at the heart of why a handful of bartenders have fallen in love with the cachaça category. The caipirinhas and batidas may be what the consumers gets their hands on most of the time, but behind the bar, experimentation and imagination can go wild.

Cachaça is probably the antithesis of vodka, where you can be sure that any recipe has been tried, tested, sold by the bucketload and then reinvented time and again. Cachaça is uncharted, unexplored and is there for invention – this time without the stereotypes.

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine - July / August 2008

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