Cachaça Old Fashioned

A spirit-forward riff on the iconic Old Fashioned using Brazil's national spirit — cachaça's grassy sugarcane character pairs brilliantly with Angostura bitters and orange.

The Cachaça Old Fashioned transposes the oldest continuously made American cocktail formula onto Brazil's national spirit, producing a drink that demonstrates how the Old Fashioned's fundamental logic — spirit allowed to express itself with minimal intervention — works across different distillation traditions. The Old Fashioned's four-ingredient structure traces to the first published definition of the word cocktail, printed in the Balance and Columbian Repository newspaper in Hudson, New York on May 13, 1806: a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters. Cachaça, produced in Brazil from fresh sugarcane juice since the 16th century, provides a spirit character fundamentally different from the bourbon or rye typically used in the American original: where aged American whiskey carries the vanilla, caramel, and spice derived from new charred oak barrels, cachaça — particularly unaged expressions — carries the grassy, fresh-cane aromatics and the floral character of sugarcane juice before any barrel influence is added. Some aged cachaças, rested in Brazilian woods including amburana, jequitibá, or in foreign oak, develop their own barrel-derived complexity. The combination of cachaça's raw cane character with Angostura bitters' clove and spice aromatics and the moderating sweetness of sugar produces a drink that feels simultaneously familiar as an Old Fashioned and distinctly non-American in its flavor, its tropical grass notes contrasting with the format's typically bourbon-derived warmth.