Cachaca is a spirit similar to (but not quite the same as) rum. The roots of Cachaca predate the distillation of rum stretching back almost 500 years to the early sixteenth century when Portuguese colonists brought cuttings of sugar cane to Brazil. The spirit they created is distilled from the fermented juice of sugar cane. Its popularity in Brazil is enormous as Wikipedia quotes 2007 figures which state 1.5 billion liters of Cachaca are consumed annually in Brazil. The Brazilian consumption alone is high enough that if Cachaca were considered its own spirits category (as perhaps it should be), it would be the ninth largest spirits category in the world.
Pitú Cachaca (which according to the label on the back of my bottle is pronounced Petee-too Kah-sha-sah) is produced by Engarrafamento Pitu Ltda., an eight decade old family run company located within Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil. Their Cachaca is made from the juice of newly harvested sugar cane which is milled to extract the juice, then filtered and fermented before undergoing distillation with the final product rested in marrying tanks to soothe the flavour before bottling.
(I was provided with a sample bottle of the Pitú Cachaca by PMA Canada who are the local importers of the Spirit here in Alberta.)
You may read my full review of this uniquely Brazilian Spirit here:
Review: Pitú Cachaca
I went a little crazy on the cocktails with this one (after all it is a cocktail spirit), and at the end of my review you can find a few cocktail recipes, one of my construction, the Amazing Tickle; and one from the producer website named the Cacharita.
Please enjoy the review and the amazing cocktails!
Danfield’s Canadian Whisky is produced in the small City of Lethbridge in my home Province of Alberta. It is produced for Williams & Churchill by Schenley Distilleries Inc. at the Black Velvet Distillery, (also referred to locally as the Palliser Distillery). Williams and Churchill are not distillers themselves, rather they appear to be a third-party company which owns the Danfield’s Brand. They are also very difficult to contact, and therefore the only information I have about the Danfield’s Limited Edition 21 Year Old Canadian Whisky comes from the little booklet which is strung around the neck of the bottle. According to this booklet, the 21 Year Old is a small batch whisky produced from rye, corn and malted barley. It is bottled at 40 % alcohol by volume and prior to this bottling, the whisky is apparently “diamond filtered” to add further polish to the whisky.
John “Calico Jack’ Rackham was a pirate of the early eighteenth century who seems to have two primary claims to fame. The first was that his design of the ship’s flag may actually have been the first use this design for a Jolly Roger flag ever on a pirate ship. The second is that his crew featured two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read (Rackham actually believed Mary Read was a man when she joined his crew).
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The Rum Howler Blog 