Cachaça

As I mentioned previously, the farmland of the state of São Paulo was once used for coffee production, but not any longer. But what is it being used for? Somewhat ironically, it is being used for exactly the same crop which the coffee originally displaced: sugar cane.

Whereas sugar cane was originally cultivated for the sugar which was back then exported to the hungry sweet-toothed European markets, it is now grown with an other purpose in mind: production of 85% ethanol (i.e. 170 proof alcohol) - primarily for the fuelling of cars on the home market, but I saw the basically same product used also as a cleansing/disinfecting agent.

Then as now, some proportion of the sugar cane was channelled for a rather for a by-product. Letting raw, unprocessed sugar cane juice ferment and then distilling it results in cachaça. Cachaça is available in literally hundreds of different varieties - ranging in prize (and rawness) from the very, very affordable (well, in Brazil anyway) to the exceedingly expensive. If you're in Brazil you just need to find yourself a cachaçaria to be able to sample a range of them.

Naturally, I brought a bottle home for myself. While you can drink it neat, the more famous way is as caipirinha. I believe it's traditionally made by crushing limes and sugar, then pouring over sugar and cachaça. I opt for a somewhat different approach because I find it easier to mix it properly (and because it's easier for me to learn the right relative proportions this way): I squeeze out the juice of one lime, add about the same volume of cachaça, 2-3 tsp sugar, ice cubes and smaller pieces of the lime I just squeezed.


Delicious!

Yerba Mate (more applied mathematics)

One morning at a pousada in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, I found myself with limited tea options. True: there were a number of different bags that I could chose to make a hot infusion from, but none of them were a straight tea. Personally disliking most flower, berry and/or spice teas I opted instead for the joker - the to me previously not encountered yerba mate. I was quite pleased with my choice. The resulting drink wasn't entirely unlike tea - straight tea, mind you - perhaps a bit smokier, but by no means too much for my taste.

When I found bags of yerba mate for sale at very reasonable prices in the supermarket I decided to import some myself (being back home again I see that I can buy it here, although not nearly as cheaply). It might not be the most authentically Brazilian thing to bring home, seeing as it is considered the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, but it's also commonly enjoyed in southern Brazil (as well as in other countries in South America).

While the drink made from yerba mate, commonly known as mate (pronounced ma-te), is quite like tea, there are a number of differences. For starters, the plant is actually a species of holly and the caffeine content is generally higher than in tea (though not as high as in coffee). Supposedly, a strongly bitter and disagreeable taste results if one pours boiling water on yerba mate. Water at 80 C (176 F) is recommended. Not wanting to find a thermometer, I opted instead for mixing proper amounts of boiling water (i.e. 100 C = 212 F) and tap water, which I assumed to be at room temperature (20 C = 68 F). Since I'm mixing water with water I don't have to worry about the specific heat capacity and the calculation simplifies quite a bit. Setting the volume of boiling water to x and the volume of tap water to y, we get (ignoring units):

100x + 20y = 80(x+y)
20x = 60y
x = 3y

which is to say that I should use 3 parts boiling water to 1 part tap water.

Another interesting difference to tea: The dried ground leaves end up as a very fine powder - much finer than any tea I've ever had. Accordingly, when I made my first pot of mate, some of the powder wasn't retained by the sieve I used. The drink had a slight cloudiness to it at first, but then the particles settled to the bottom of my tea cup. Of course, I have no right complain - drinking, as a I am, mate like a know-nothing barbarian. Tradition dictates that mate be drunk through a specially designed metal straw (called a bomba or bombilla) from a hollowed gourd.