Brazil’s Fiery Spirit, Distilled - The Australian

When the first convicts arrived in Australia, the crew toasted their arrival not with sherry, whisky or champagne from arch-foe France, but with an obscure Brazilian drink called cachaca.

Like other flotillas bound for the southern oceans, the First Fleet had stopped in Rio de Janeiro to gather supplies.

The crew would have caused a bloody mutiny had the hold not been filled with the strongest spirit available, and given they were now far from the rum-soaked Caribbean, the only option was to stock up on the local firewater, cachaca.

Deep in the Brazilian jungle at Adega Scherer distillery, I’m ingesting this fascinating history, along with tiny shots of cachaca for breakfast. It’s not necessarily something I’d recommend: at roughly 80 proof, this cane-sugar spirit tastes strong enough to run the farm machinery.

I close my eyes and try to ignore the cacophony of insects as I urge my palate to find the deeper complexity that has made this fiery spirit Brazil’s national drink.

More than two billion litres of cachaca are produced in Brazil every year — about 11 litres for every man, woman and child.

For his part, my host Bruno Scherer makes 15,000 litres annually, which is sold exclusively through Ponta Dos Ganchos, the luxury resort on Brazil’s Emerald Coast south of Sao Paulo that has arranged my tour.

The distillery has changed little in 180 years. Bruno’s great grandfather, Peter Scherer, came to Brazil from Hamburg, Germany, and distilled sugar cane in much the same manner used to make Bavarian fruit wines.

Today’s batches of cachaca are ageing in the same barrel room, and the pink gingerbread-style house — straight out of a Grimm’s fairytale — is still very much the Scherer family home.

In one room a giant copper still is connected to a series of tubes like an incubated newborn baby.

As we wander the rustic distillery — with its gleaming instruments and deep, pleasingly complex smell of barrels, raw alcohol and earth — Scherer explains that just as with extra virgin olive oil, only the first pressing of the spirit is used.

After three days’ fermentation the liquid is distilled. Both the first and last distillations are discarded, with only the middle one, cachaca boa, making it into oak barrels; that’s about 15 per cent of the starting liquid.

I raise a glass with our host.

He spills a few drops in the dirt “for the saints” and savours its contents.

I have already had my guia (the first drink is known as a guide) and it makes the subsequent shots go down a little more easily.

The earnest and throat-numbing tasting of the umpteen varieties of aged spirits I eventually try soon renders me a little cachaca-ed out.

Finally we come to a tall glass vial filled with honeycomb and cachaca. The spirit has leached the honey from the towering shard and it floats like an architectural model of an abandoned building.

I take a sip of the honeycomb-infused drink and it is delicious: deep, sweet, smoky and floral all at once.

Maybe being a sailor on the First Fleet might not have been so bad after all.

Words by Adam McCulloch. Originally published in The Australian. The format has been altered to suit Tumblr. To view the original story click here.