Cocktails with Cachaça
Cachaça is Brazil's national spirit, distilled from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice rather than the molasses behind most rum.
ABV38–48%
Taste profile
White cachaça is grassy and vegetal — think green cane, lime leaf and a touch of funk. Age it in wood and it turns rounder, picking up vanilla, spice and dried fruit.
How it's used
White cachaça is the base of the Caipirinha, Brazil's national drink — lime and sugar are muddled, cachaça poured over, and its fresh grassy bite is the whole point. That bright, funky edge also carries sours and batidas. Aged bottles are smoother, better sipped neat or stirred into spirit-forward drinks.
Substitutes for Cachaça
Rhum agricole is the closest match — it too is distilled from fresh cane juice and shares the grassy character. White rum will do in a pinch, but its cooked-sugar, vanilla notes sit less happily against the lime in a Caipirinha.
Often confused with
Molasses-based rum
Cachaça is always made from fresh sugarcane juice, while most rum is distilled from molasses, a by-product of sugar refining. US law even classes cachaça as a type of rum, so the two names often get used interchangeably.
Rhum agricole
Both are distilled from fresh sugarcane juice and share the same grassy character. The difference is really regulatory and geographic — cachaça is the Brazilian denomination, rhum agricole mainly a French-Caribbean one.
