All alcohol is crafted through the mechanism of fermentation, which involves feeding yeast with sugar. Wine is made from the sugar in grapes, mead utilizes honey, and whiskey deploys sugar from grains like barley, corn. Cesachaça and rum essentially use sugar cane. Depending on who you ask, rum and cachaça might belong to the same spirits category, however, many strongly insist on them being unique.
The reality might be a bit of a mixture. It would be more accurate to consider rum and cachaça as variants of the same theme, much like bourbon and scotch are both forms of whiskey. Although, that’s far from being the official understanding. There’s also a third type of beverage made from sugar cane that could potentially fit into this hypothetical rum family which is known as rhum agricole, but we’ll save that story for another day.
The histories of both rum and cachaça intertwine at certain points before separately diverging and uniting later on. As the preferred beverage for tourists and pirates alike, it’s undeniable that rum is more widely recognized between the two spirits. Despite the fact that cachaça predates rum and is occasionally referred to as the Mother of Rum, without a doubt, cachaça has the distinction of being the first distilled spirit to have ever existed in South America.
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Somewhat surprisingly, cachaça (pronounced kah-shah-sah) is the third-most consumed spirit in the entire world, though most of us aren’t aware since 99% of consumption happens in Brazil. Made from fermented fresh sugar cane juice, cachaça is a hidden gem that’s quickly becoming Brazil’s best worst-kept secret. If you’ve heard of cachaça already, you’ve probably heard of the cocktail it’s most associated with – Brazil’s national drink, the Caipirinha. A Caipirinha is made by muddling lime wedges and some sugar with cachaça and topping it off with ice. For being so simple, the drink has no business tasting so good.
The origin of cachaça is a little less laissez-faire, given that it’s a direct outcome of the Portuguese sugar cane plantations that cropped up in the 1500s. There are a few variations on the origin story but it was either the slaves running the plantations who made the first cachaça from the excess foam that gathers when processing sugar cane into sugar or it was the Portuguese plantation owners who used their knowledge of Arabic distilling methods to make the spirit from their produce.
Either way, cachaça spent the first years of its life being a cheap alcohol favored by Brazilian slaves before becoming a popular drink enjoyed by all social classes by the 1700s. This dichotomy has continued to this day. In modern Brazil, there are plenty of cheap, mass-produced cachaças that counterbalance the expensive craft cachaças that only the wealthy can afford.
Similar to cachaça, rum was born out of colonial sugar plantations scattered throughout the Caribbean islands. The first written record of rum dates back to 1650, a full 100 years after cachaça had gotten its start further south. It would go on to play a pivotal role in American history, where it was enjoyed as a cheap alternative to more expensive luxuries like brandy and port. Whiskey overtook rum as the drink of choice only after Britain taxed molasses into obscurity in an effort to regain control over the American economy.
The original plan may have backfired, but the idea of a rum-infused America presents a fascinating alternative history. Presently, rum is categorized into distinct types. For instance, dark rum, the original and thickest variety, is a specialty of Jamaica and Barbados. The trend of producing light, golden, or clear rum came about in the 19th century, a style particularly notable in Cuban and Puerto Rican rums. More about rum types.
While it’s uncommon to find people enjoying rum on the rocks outside of the Caribbean, there exists a number of premium rums that are certainly worthy of the honor. More often than not, rum is mixed with another ingredient, demonstrated in cocktails like Rum & Coke or a Daiquiri. Rum however, truly shines in the sphere of tiki drinks, arguably the most impressive category of cocktails. In these delightful combos, dark and light rums often come together, giving rise to legendary mixed drinks like Donn Beach’s Zombie.
Despite rum and cachaça both chiefly comprising sugar cane, their manufacturing processes differ in usage. In order to appreciate this disparity, we must first comprehend the method by which sugar is created. Once harvested, sugar cane stalks are crushed to extract the juice, which is then boiled and spun to separate sugar crystals from contaminants, the latter known as molasses. Sugar producers repeat this process thrice, each time attaining increasingly dark molasses, until they are left with blackstrap molasses.
The production of Cachaça involves the fermentation of fresh sugar cane juice, with yeast added into the mix. Once fermentation is complete and the liquid is distilled, cachaça is obtained. The making of rum is more complex, due to fewer strict regulations in its production. Typically, rum is derived by fermenting and distilling molasses, though it can technically be made from fresh sugar cane juice as well, albeit atypical.
Using fresh sugar cane juice is a major reason why cachaça has such a bright, vegetal flavor profile whereas rum will often have the familiar thick sweetness of rich molasses. Lighter rums use a variety of tactics to lighten the palate (including filtration), but as a general overview, it’s useful to remember where these drinks come from.
Another major factor in the flavor differences is how these drinks are aged. A good chunk of the cachaça produced is unaged, essentially going straight from the still to the bottle. Cheaper cachaças, in particular, will take advantage of this. Some cachaça will be left to rest in stainless steel vats for about a year before being bottled which is said to soften the harsher edges. But what’s really unique about aged cachaça is that there are no restrictions on what kind of wood it can be aged in.
Most other spirits have specific types of wood they can use, such as new oak barrels for whiskey. Cachaça can be aged in oak, but many distilleries will use Brazil nut, araúva, amburana, jequitibá, balm, and many other locally sourced wood for barrels – each of which offers its own unique flavor profile to the mix. The choice of wood and how long the cachaça is aged will affect its color as well.
The vast majority of gold and dark rums are aged in used oak barrels, specifically old bourbon barrels. A requirement for making bourbon is that the barrels they age in must be new every time. Once the bourbon is finished, rum producers will buy the barrels and use them to age their products. It’s a common practice shared by other aged spirits, as well. Light rums don’t want the added color that used bourbon barrels impart so they’ll often be aged in stainless steel vats before being filtered.
Rum can be found all over the world, though its production naturally congregates around the tropical and subtropical regions where sugar cane grows. Caribbean islands like Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba are some of the first to come to mind, but you can find excellent rums coming out of India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well. The global presence of rum helps explain why more people are familiar with it as a liquor category. Cachaça, on the other hand, is not a global phenomenon.
Much like other regionally-designated alcohols such as Champagne and Cognac, cachaça cannot be legally produced anywhere except Brazil. There are thousands of cachaça distilleries throughout the country, but only a handful are investing in the global distribution of their product, which explains why this spirit is not as well-known. Over the past few decades, this has begun to change. Cachaça distilleries with the means to tackle the problem are seeing a large, untapped market in the global economy and are beginning to turn their focus outside of Brazilian borders.
When cachaça first began selling in the United States, it was labeled as Brazilian rum – either out of convenience or through ignorance. It didn’t take long for Brazil to correct the mistake, but it could help explain the confusion surrounding these two spirits. These days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a cocktail bar worth their salt that doesn’t have some cachaça on the shelf and we are already seeing innovative new cocktails based around the recently added spirit.
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