Stacole Craft Spirits Book

PITÚ BRAZIL Silver Brazilian Cachaça #659445 / 1.0L / $12.67

PITÚ GOLD APPLE INGREDIENTS 60 ml. Pitú Gold Premium Cachaça

Family-owned Pitú has a reputation for world class quality and is the most globally exported cachaça brand. Made from pure, unrefined, first pressed sugar cane juice, Pitú’s master distiller carefully blends the different batches to yield a consistent character and superior level of quality. 88pts Wine Enthusiast Gold Brazilian Cachaça #410278 / 1.0L / $20.99 “Golden and bright, this spirit tends toward the herbal side, with almost cola-like sweet vanilla and anise notes perked up by grass and bell pepper flavors.”

20 ml. vanilla syrup 50 ml. apple juice DIRECTIONS

Fill the shaker with all ingredients. Shake and strain over ice into a Martini glass previously sprinkled with cinnamon powder. Garnish with slices of apple.

PITÚ SPICY & GREEN INGREDIENTS 50 ml. Pitú Cachaça

92pts Wine Enthusiast Vitoriosa Cachaça #599612 / 750ml / $104.99

20 ml. simple syrup 5 Thompson grapes

10 ml. Cointreau Sprig of arugula

1 slice of lime

A maturation in French oak barrels for five years results in a silky mouthfeel with notes of spices, burnt coconut, vanilla, toffee and almonds. Presented in a beautiful pear-shaped decanter, this premium cachaça is best served at neat or “on the rock”. 92pts Wine Enthusiast Cachaça You Know Rum—But What Is Cachaça?

DIRECTIONS Muddle the grapes, arugula and lime in the shaker and then add all other ingredients. Shake and strain over ice cubes into a Martini glass previously sprinkled with ground black pepper. Garnish with grapes.

— PITUUSA.COM/RECIPES

“Cachaça is most definitely not a rum,” says Dragos Axinte of Novo Fogo Cachaça.“At the highest level, cachaça is made from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, while rum is made from molasses. Molasses is a by- product of the process of making sugar from sugarcane and has very different characteristics from sugarcane juice, since it’s been boiled. I would say that [rum and cachaça] are

molasses, whereas cachaça is made straight from the sugarcane itself. Because cachaça is distilled from raw sugarcane, it retains a grassy, sulfurous, earthy quality that rum lacks—rum, by turn, is sweeter with more notes of vanilla. That’s because distilling from molasses brings out notes of the cooked sugarcane that either aren’t present in raw sugarcane or are overshadowed by its herbacious nature. SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

distant cousins.” Cachaça is often

called Brazilian rum, a nickname that isn’t entirely wrong: both rum and cachaça are made from sugar, but rum is made from sugarcane by-products, like

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