Abelha Cachaça UK

Abelha featured in an article in Drinks International. By Jaq Bayles.

After a long weekend of cheap paint and the wrong size screws in the Abelha Research Lab (Ant’s Shed) the Abelha beach bar cart was born. We went to Festinho with a good crew of Matt, Andy, Ferdie, Rosie, Yael and the inimitable Mr Jeevon. After an initial setback in which the cart blew over and broke 2 of the bulbs in the disco lights, we anchored it down, rocked out hard and gave people a lot of caipirinha joy.

A huge hit at the festival were the Abelha cocktails, Caipirinha. Abelha is a 100% organic cachaca (a brazilian rum) freshly mixed at the Beach Bar these were seen all around the festival…

Perfect Pitch Magazine

Festinho was excellent, great organisation, good atmosphere, and good beats. They raise a lot of money for the ABC Trust too, which is a charity supporting Brazilian Children. Thanks to the organisers, volunteers, everyone who helped out, and everyone who had a drink with us!

Our friend Milo just finished the art on our new van. He’s done an incredible mural featuring sugar cane, bees (in case you missed it, Abelha means ‘bee’ in Portuguese), a wave on the right hand side for when we go surfing, and he even squeezed in our Management Accountant, Pedro Souza dos Santos, on the back. Honk if you see us around!

Pretty exciting - Abelha Cachaça are working with Whole Foods Market in Kensington as our official retail partner! They will be stocking Abelha Silver and Abelha Gold in their new spirits section, alongside a lot of other excellent, organic spirits.

If you haven’t been to the store before, you should do - it’s huge, and full of delicious stuff, including a machine from which you can blend and dispense your own fresh pistachio nut butter. We are now giving you the perfect excuse to get down there, as this Saturday 29th August, we’ll be down there doing sampling.

We’ll be knocking out caipirinhas, other fresh fruit cocktails and a delicious new serve of Abelha Cachaça mixed with Organic Elderflower Presse, all made with things you can find in the store.

2-6 pm, Saturday 26th August

Whole Foods Market
www.wholefoodsmarket.com
63 Kensington High St
London, W8
020 7368 4500

Nice little feature on us by Esquire magazine, along with Cabana and Ypioca. Click the image to read the whole article.

Incidentally, my favourite other brand cachaças that are available here in the UK - am I supposed to say this on here? - Beija Flor Pura for taste, and Leblon for the marketing and product story.

We pleased to announce that Coe Vintners are now distributing Abelha Cachaca to bars and restaurants around London.

If you already purchase from Coe’s, just ask your rep. If not, get in touch with them on
+44 (020) 8551 4966 or via their website www.coevintners.com/. Or get in touch with us directly on the contact page.

Pictures from our Annual Surf Trip and Strategic Vision Alignment Management Camp. Caipirinhas on the beach at Woolacombe Bay, North Devon.

In case you’re wondering why it’s called surf show, when it clearly isn’t actually a show, it’s because in Brasil, they love the english word “show” and frequently misuse it to mean something that isn’t a show at all. Hence you might see a little hot dog vending cart called HOTDOG SHOW.

I’m just back from hanging out at the fazenda (farm) in Brasil. We talked a lot about cane, yeast, fermentation, distillation (I talked in very bad Portuguese), tasted a lot of cachaça, and even managed to get a day’s surfing in too. So a great trip all round.

Seriously though, we’ve been discussing feedback from everyone here in the UK with our distillers and and trying to work out ways which we can make Abelha even better in the future.

We also have the first run out of an Abelha that’s been aged for 6 years in oak, which is absolutely delicious. More news to come on that, but in the meanwhile, here’s a few picture highlights of Bahia.

Our farm in the Chapada Diamantinha

Treehouse on the farm

Nice graffiti in Salvador

Love this little street coffee cart, especially the fact it’s a 6 wheeler

Cachaça Store in Salvador

This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but then Joe McCanta (owner of Saf Restaurant, excellent cocktail place in Shoreditch, London) wrote a really good treatise about it on his blog. It’s about where the idea of organic spirits came from, and why it’s important.

The trend really started in the wine industry with many of the world’s finest vineyard owners realizing the negative effect that chemicals were having on their highly valuable land. Starting first with the ancient vineyards of France and Italy, word began spreading that maybe the ‘steroid-like’ pollutants that Agro-Chemical companies were pushing on farmers all over the world in the ‘80s and ‘90s were actually poisoning the land and making grapes that were weaker in flavor and lacking a certain subtlety or depth they once had.  At the same time as more and more vineyard owners who embraced natural methods began winning awards and vocalizing their success with bio-growing, the word ‘organic’ became associated with ‘fresher’, ‘more taste’, and just plain higher quality.

This gets to the heart of why we use organic methods - quality and taste. Essentially, most non-organic farming techniques are about shortcuts. They’re a quicker way to get more yield, but at the expense of other qualities, for example:

• burning sugar cane fields prior to harvest, making it quicker (cheaper) to cut, but damaging the cane
• using a laboratory single-strain yeast to ferment because it works quicker than a natural yeast, but it doesn’t produce the same flavours
• using artificial fertilisers and pesticides to get a bigger crop, but a lower quality of cane

Organically producers are generally much more open about their methods, firstly because they’re scrutinised more by inspection bodies, and also because they’re proud to be using natural farming techniques that generate better produce.

This level of transparency is also really important to us - we want to be happy with every little detail about the ingredients, their provenance and the production process. At the end of the day though, the proof is in the taste, and we’re happy that Abelha is a naturally full-flavoured traditional ‘alembique’ cachaca. Try it and see!

I’m pleased to announce that we have now set up a new secret off license right store on Berwick Street, right in the center of Soho, London.

Berwick News and Food, shortly to be renamed Berwick News, Food and Quality Cachaça, is now stocking Abelha Cachaça Silver and Gold. It’s an excellent shop and I suggest you go there on your lunchbreak to get a Mars bar, bag of Frazzles and a 70cl bottle of Abelha Cachaça. That’s what I have for lunch every day anyway.

Cachaça Abelha Silver £16.99 - excellent unaged cachaça with great nose, full flavour and a smooth dry finish. Great for caipirinhas and other cocktails.

Cachaça Abelha Gold £22.99 - a matchless cachaça that’s aged for three years in Brasilian Ash barrels to give it beautiful mellow flavour. For sipping neat, caipirinhas or cocktails, or in a shot glass with a dot of honey.

Click around our site to read more about our cachaça. Check the map too for other bars or restaurants that stock us.

Berwick News and Food
39 Berwick Street
Soho
London
W1F 8RU

Tel: 020 7287 8583

Open Monday to Saturday, 7.30am to 8pm
Nearest tubes: Tottenham Court Road (5 minutes walk) or Oxford Circus (5 minutes walk)