Abelha Cachaça UK

Nice recipe from our friend Joe who runs the excellent organic/botanical bar/restaurant, Saf.

We recently did some sampling at Whole Foods supermarket in Kensington, London (the range of stuff there never ceases to amaze me, along with how good looking some of the shoppers are), where as well as doing caipirinhas we had a big pot of hot mulled Abelha Gold 3 year old on the stove. This proved to be a real winner on a cold winters day, with people coming back for more and more.

Mulled cachaça is popular in Brasil, where it’s called a Quentão (big hot thing) and served in the colder months. As with any old folk tradition there’s no one ‘right’ recipe – there exist regional variations, and like feijoada (traditonal Brasilian black bean pork stew) only your own granny makes the best one.

Here’s what we did:

• 1 bottle Abelha Organic Cachaça Gold (3 year old)
• Zest half an orange into the pot (make sure the oils from the skin spray onto the liquid)
• Juice of an orange (can use more to taste)
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• Teaspoon of cloves
• a piece of finely chopped fresh ginger.
• about 8 teaspoons of fine light brown sugar

There different things you can do like caramelise the sugar first for a richer flavour, but we were hungover and I wanted a drink as quickly as possible. So we went for the time honoured method of putting everything in the pot and heating it. You only really need to mull it for a short amount of time (10-15 mins max) as because it’s strong alcohol it picks up flavours very quickly from the ingredients.

If you’re making more, don’t leave old cloves in there – if you mull them for too long, they start to give a bitter flavour.

Serve in little cups. Remember that even though it’s very drinkable it’s still a very strong spirit, about 3 times the potency of mulled wine. Enjoy!

50ml Abelha Cachaca Gold (3 year old), into an ice filled highball. Top up with Ting (Jamaican Grapefruit Soda).

In terms of a basic cachaca + mixer drink, I don’t think you can get much better than this. The fruityness of the 3 year really shines through the Ting. It’s a difficult one to describe, but it just really works. From the most unlikely Jamaican/Brasilian ambassador, Will Foster of Casita Bar, London.

Link to Casita Facebook Page

From Colin Macy, who heads up the bar at Barrio North, this is a delicious tropical take on a White Lady:

40ml Cachaça Abelha Silver
20ml Cointreau
20ml Lemon Juice
15ml Simple Syrup
Flesh of half a passionfruit
Half an egg white

Dry shake all ingredients (to add froth), then add ice and re-shake. Fine strain into a coupette, and garnish with the other half of the passionfruit.

Mixology Monday is a monthly online drink-related discussion. This month, it’s hosted by Craig at Tiki Drinks & Indigo Firmaments and the theme is ‘spice’.

Victoria Park in December, just outside my house in London

In England, spice in December means the Christmas traditionals of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. As soon as winter hits and it starts to get dark at around 4pm, there is nothing else to do apart from stay in, make a big pot of mulled wine, and endeavour to keep it warm, spicy and topped up at all costs, until the daylight comes back in February. This winter though, I’ve been playing around a lot with cachaça.*

While everybody thinks of cachaça as a summer drink, I’ve been making some cachaça infusions based on traditional English Christmas flavours. The first was a pear and spice one:

Christmas Spice Pear Infused Cachaça
1 70cl bottle Abelha Cachaça Silver (unaged)
1 pear (conference)
half a cinnamon stick
2 teaspoons fresh grated ginger
10 clove seeds
half a teaspoon grated nutmeg
Skin and cut the pear, let all ingredients sit for 4 weeks in a jar or bottle at room temperature, shaking it every couple of days.

This came out really nicely and the sugar cane notes of the cachaça work really well with the ginger. It feels they make a warm blanket in your mouth which then gets covered in lovely spices.

I was talking to Jay at Oh Gosh! about old fashioned style serves, and he hinted me towards grapefruit bitters. They work really well with cachaça; I think it’s because they’re a little bit lime-esque, which is cachaça’s natural citrus partner. So here is a Christmas take on a cachaça Old Fashioned.

Spiced Pear Cachaça Old Fashioned
25ml Pear and Spice infused cachaça
25ml Aged cachaça (e.g. Abelha Cachaça Gold – aged 3 years)
2 dashes Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters
1 dash Angostura Bitters
1 spoon of fine white sugar
a bit of orange peel

Put sugar and bitters in a tumbler, add ice and cachaça gradually, bit by bit, stirring all the time. Squeeze the oils out of the orange peel, (flame them if you wish), then stick a couple of clove seeds into the orange peel and use it as a garnish.

The freshness of the orange zest on the nose provides a nice little contrast to all the warm flavours of the spices. With the spice infused cachaça, the Angostura Bitters aren’t necessary, but the grapefruit ones do just enough to avoid sweetness overload. The litmus test – I was sharing it with my friend whilst we were bantering the evening away, and we both had real difficulty passing the drink back to each other. While I was drinking it, the dog put his head on my lap, and I felt utterly fulfilled inside. I would have happily died at that point and become re-incarnated as a pair of warm slippers or a smoking jacket.

the dog

Do you guys have minced pies in the US/around the world?

Photo by WallyG

Mince Pies - they’re little sweet short pastry pies filled with ‘mincemeat’ which in this case actually means a mix of raisins, apples, sultanas and fruit peel, normally steeped in brandy. In the UK, you have to eat them at Christmas, or else you get accused of being in Al-Qaeda and The Queen can shoot you. They’re something of an obsession to the British, and the best crowd pleasing infusion we made was a “Mince Pie Infused Cachaca”. It’s brilliant for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the words “pie-infused” before any spirit just don’t sound right. Also, in the UK, pie is a funny word. It’s a synonym for fat, as in “You’re looking a bit pie since you started going out with Tom?”, “Yeah, I’ve got love chub.” We also have a football chant of “Who ate all the pies?“, which is a standard thing for a mob to politely shout at someone who is circumferentially challenged.

The other reason is that it’s simply delicious. All the citrus peels in the mince are fantastic with the cachaça, but I think ‘mince meat’ would be an excellent infusion for a bourbon (not a scotch though) or rum too. Vodka would work too I guess, but I think the sweetness in spirits like bourbon, cachaça or rum really lift apart the flavours of all those annoying little granny fruits in the mince meat.

I made 2 versions, one using Delia Smith’s recipe, and one using a jar of pre-bought Tesco’s (Tesco is a large, aka, monopoly grocery chain in the UK) mincemeat. In both cases 300g of mince meat to one 70cl bottle of Abelha Cachaça Silver seemed right. I left these for about three and a half weeks, and they came out delicious.

It’s a great thing to serve to people in a shot glass as they come in from the cold. If you wanted to make a cocktail with it, I would suggest the following, based on the fact that we normally eat mince pies with cream, but custard would be good too:

Brasilian Mince Pie with Custard
50ml Mince Pie infused spirit (bourbon, rum, cachaça etc)
20ml Fresh Apple juice
Half an egg yolk
Half a spoon of fine sugar
10ml single cream
Shake with ice, strain into a chilled martini glass, dust with fresh nutmeg and serve.

This one could use a little work. I have suddenly got to the end of the post and am thinking that no-one has a clue what mince pies are, but there you go. Holla if you love mince pies!!

Anthony

* Disclosure: Me (Anthony) and my friend Hal have recently started our own independent brand of cachaça which we are importing to the UK. It’s an artisanal, copper pot still, small-batch cachaça, which also happens to be organic, and produced ethically. It’s called Abelha Cachaça, and this is our blog. But anyway I hope that noone minds that we we taking part in Mixology Monday as a brand and that you enjoy the reading about the drinks. I made them in my kitchen and I promise they are delicious.

First of all, if anyone tells you there is only one way to make to a caipirinha, or that there’s only one “real brazilian way”, it’s simply not true. Having travelled for months all over Brasil and drunk loads of caipirinhas, from the poshest hotel bars, to numerous Brasilian homes, to beach stands, to appalling lanchonetes (Brasilian version of a greasy spoon), I can confirm that the only consistent thing is that you get cachaça, lime, ice and sugar (or artificial sweetener) in a glass. Beyond that, it’s all a lottery. The drink is so ubiquitous and varied, that it’s like claiming there is only one way to make mulled wine, or a hot toddy.

Nonetheless, there are better and worse ways. We base our recipe on the following:

Consistency – is incredibly important for pleasing people, and learning the craft of making drinks.
Hassle factor – ingredients that are easily available, and a quick, easy method
Taste - striking a good balance between strength, flavour and taste

Ingredients (per drink)

• 50ml Abelha Cachaça Silver or Abelha Cachaça Gold
• 1/2 a Lime
• 2 heaped teaspoons Castor Sugar (fine white sugar)
• Ice
• Tumbler (low glass)

Method

Cut the lime into quarters. If you can be bothered, cut out the white core of the lime – it’s bitter. Cut the corners into smaller bits, and put half a limes worth in the tumbler glass.

Add 2 heaped teaspoons of castor sugar. We use castor sugar because it dissolves consistently, rather than half-dissolving and sitting in the bottom of the glass, leaving the sweetness unpredictable. Same reason we don’t use syrup – you can’t ensure the consistency of it – also for those making it at home, it saves you making syrup.

Muddle (squish) the limes. If you don’t have a muddler, here are some kitchen items that are good – a fixed gear rolling pin, a wine bottle upside down, the bottom of a small bottle – e.g. Worcester sauce.

If you have no suitable implement, squeeze the juice out of the lime bits with your fingers as you add them. it’s vital that you get all the juice out the lime bits.

Crush some ice. How you crush your ice is very very important to how your drink comes out. This is because the finer the ice, the faster it melts, and the more dilute the drink. Not fine enough, and the drink tastes too strong.

If you don’t have an ice crusher, I recommend wrapping ice cubes in a tea towel and smashing them hard about 10 times on a hard wall or floor. When you are done, there should be a little bit of ‘snow’. Fill the glass 3/4 full with this crushed ice.

Pour a 50ml shot of Abelha Cachaça over the ice. This is starting to look real good.

Take a cocktail stirrer (or the back of a fork, or a chopstick), place your left palm over the glass, leaving space where your thumb nook is to insert the stirrer, and mix it. Don’t stir, it’s more like whisking. If you use crushed ice, and muddle well, there is no need to use a cocktail shaker to make a caipirinha.

Top the glass up with ice, un-crushed or crushed, and stick a straw in it. You are done.

Edit: here is an excellent instructional video which we made last year after perhaps sampling too much of our own cachaça:

How to make a caipirinha cocktail from Abelha Cachaca on Vimeo.