Germana Palha Cachaca

Palha means straw, and the name is the bottle: Germana's two-year-aged cachaça comes wrapped in a hand-tied banana leaf, the way the house has dressed its bottles for over a century. Germana is one of Brazil's great artisanal cachaça houses, founded in 1912 in Nova União, Minas Gerais — the state that's to cachaça what Cognac is to brandy — and it makes everything the traditional way: fresh sugarcane juice from the estate, fermented with a natural yeast culture that includes cornmeal, distilled in copper pot stills, and aged. Palha spends two years in a combination of Brazilian woods and oak, bottled at 40% ABV. Two years in wood is a long time for cachaça, most of which is sold unaged: expect a pale gold pour with a nose of fresh cane, vanilla, honey, and a faint tropical fruit note with the earthy, grassy funk of pot-still cane spirit underneath, opening into a rounded, gently sweet palate where the wood softens the cane's green edge into caramel and spice, finishing smooth and moderately long. Honest note: this is a lightly aged sipping cachaça, a step up in polish from the unaged Soul and less exotic than the amburana-aged Caetano's — the middle of the Germana range. For a Caipirinha with more depth, a Cachaça Old Fashioned, a Batida, or neat over one cube, it's Minas Gerais in a banana leaf.

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