Single Sourced Cachaca
Avua Cachaca Prata....$29.99
Avuá Prata Cachaça is rested in stainless steel casks before being hand bottled. The result is a LUSH and CRISP spirit with subtle floral notes perfect for exciting new cocktails, or the O'Clássico Caipirinha. Discover and enjoy our unique hand crafted Avuá Prata Cachaça cocktails.
"Take Fazenda da Quinta, an artisanal producer deep in the backcountry of Rio de Janiero state: a few hundred acres of cane grown without pesticides, cut by hand, run through a water-wheel-powered, and pot-distilled. Avuá Prata, rested in steel, is soft and creamy, with grassy tequila-like notes and a light but persistent funk or "hogo" that makes you want more. It makes a stellar caipirinha." Dave Wondrich, Esquire
O’Clássico - 2oz Avuá Cachaça Prata, 4 muddled lime wedges, 1 sugar cube and ¾oz simple syrup.
The Girl from Ipanema - 2oz Avuá Cachaça Prata, 4 muddled lime wedges 1oz pomegranate seeds, 1 sugar cube and ¾oz simple syrup
Avuá Oak Cachaça, following Brazilian tradition, is aged for up to 2 years in French Oak, or carvalho, previously used to age white wine. Carvalho, the most common wood used for cachaça-aging in Brazil, imparts notes of vanilla and butterscotch. Oak-aged cachaça finishes dry with a slight bitterness that has many layers for an exquisite sipping spirit. It is also the perfect base for stirred cocktails and tropical cocktails like the Mai Tai or Planter's Punch.
Avua Cachaca Tapinhoa...$59.99
Avuá Tapinhoã Cachaça is aged in tapinhoã wood, an extremely rare hardwood found in parts of South America. The spirit is aged in a barrel used decades ago by our distiller's father. After a lengthy recommissioning process, and up to 2 years of aging, we are proud to offer our second unique Brazilian wood offering. This wood imparts flavors of toasted coconut, fresh honeycomb, and caramel. The soft, sweet notes imparted by the wood create the perfect sipping spirit. Try it on the rocks, neat, or in a cocktail showcasing its incredible flavor.
WHAT IS CACHAÇA?
Cachaça is a spirit with almost five hundred years of history, distilling and blending the three great trends in Brazilian culture: Indian, African, and Portuguese. It is a distilled spirit made from fresh sugarcane juice and can be made in any part of Brazil. There are two types of cachaça, artisanal and industrial. In Brazil, these cachaças are perceived very differently – industrial cachaca being like a cheap vodka and artisanal cachaca being a product for connoisseurs. While there are a number of differences, the basic distinction is the use of column stills (industrial) and pot stills (artisanal).
Artisanal cachaças are highly controlled, delicate distillations within pot stills, fermented using more delicate and/or local wild yeast strains and the rarest forms can retail in Brazil for up to $500 USD, particularly the rare Minas Gerais cachaças.
It is defined under Brazilian law as a beverage with an alcohol content of between 38-54% by volume made from the distillation of fresh sugarcane juice. The sugarcane juice must be fermented in general in less than 24 hours than pressing. Distillers may add sugar to the spirit at up to 6 gram per liter, and any more than that must be labeled as cachaça dulce, or “sweet cachaça”.
HISTORY OF CACHAÇA
Cachaça is a people’s spirit and its history is inextricably tied to the history of slavery in Brazil, just as bourbon’s history is inextricably tied to the history of poor Scotch-Irish immigrants to the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee. Industrial cachaça has many names, many of them funny or derogatory. It has been made since the 1500s, which means that cachaça is older than rum, which began production in the 1600s.
As the Portuguese owners discovered the cachaça that sugarcane juice fermented, they imported their own stills. As Portugal had inherited its traditions from the Arabic Ummayyad history of the Iberian Peninsula, they use cognac style stills in order to distill the garapa, or mashbill. The use of pot stills, combined with talented distillers, caused the creation of a personal industry.
The history of cachaça is a history of agricultural landowners. The plantation owners would utilize stills to create a bourgeois product for their consumption, and even today you see engineers or other educated landowners retiring to produce cachaça on the family farm.
As Brazilian immigration peaked and a number of Italians, Lebanese, French and Germans entered Brazil, they began to purchase land and implemented their own distilling traditions. Most of this immigration occurred – as in North America – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and at that time, there was an increase in the number and quality of traditional cachaça brands and production heritages, much of which date from the early 1900s or 1920s like the producers of Avuá. Many of these traditions elevated the production of cachaça just as Avuá and other brands are elevating the way cachaça is communicated.
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