CACHAÇA CARVALHEIRA BRASIL

The founder of Cachaça Carvalheira, who had experience with sugar, alcohol, and brandy businesses, was employed by Usina Rio Una in 1949. By 1961, he was the director for that group's four facilities until 1967. He then led TECAL Tecnologia, managing over sixty companies in the northeast within the alcohol, sugar, and brandy industries. After a trip to Cuba in 1993, he proposed to his son that they buy the Instituto Cubano de Investigaciones de los Derivados de la Caña de Azúcar. Following a visit to Cuba, his son hired technicians in Recife to develop yeasts. In 1995, he acquired European oak barrels and started making his own cachaça. The Carvalheira distillery, located in Recife, partnered with the bar chain The People to open a bar on the rooftop of a major city mall. This bar features Carvalheira cachaças, and it's where I sampled them all. Sadly, they were quite poor, to the extent that I questioned their authenticity. The surname Eduardo Carvalheira originates from Quinta da Carvalheira in Portugal; the estate was owned by the family of Frederico Pereira Pinto, Eduardo's great-grandfather, who relocated to Brazil as a child. The Cachaça Carvalheira Tradicional Extra Premium ages for 5 years in oak barrels and has a 38% alcohol content. Personal thoughts: While there's no specific detail on this variant, I suspect it's a more basic cachaça, not yet aged in wood for caipirinha. Personal thoughts: It's clear, alcoholic, vegetal, herbal, bitter, and regrettably, unbalanced.