Tea Leaves

Cachaça is a Brazilian rum-like sugarcane based spirit. Earlier this year I slammed Cachaça in an offhand manner, based on my experience in trying one brand. Dave Catania, aka “Cachaça Dave”, commented and challenged me to try the brand of Cachaça that he imports, “Fazenda Mae de Ouro”.

I’ve accepted the challenge. Here’s the full review:

I’ll be honest: the only reason I did this in a videoblog format is that a certain friendly company loaned me an HD-format dv camera, and I wanted to try it out. I apologize in advance for the poor lighting, the bad editing, and the general ugliness of my face, body, and spirit.

I also apologize for my tragically consistent mispronounciation of “cachaça”, which my friend Francisco tells me is in fact pronounced “cashassa”, and not “catchassa.” I guess this is my comeuppance for giving people grief about mispronouncing the italian appetizer as “brushetta,” rather than “brusketta.”

After harshing on them last week for how clunky their SLO system is, I will take a moment to say something nice about them: my Special Liquor Order arrived today. That means that it took them less than a week to get 3 fairly exotic bottles of liquor into my local store, and they got the order exactly right, despite my snark.

So while it may be a painfully slow process to place an SLO, I have no complaints at all about the actual delivery process. I’ll just say “Thanks, PLCB!”

While on my recent trip to California, I visited a couple of liquor stores — the venerable BevMo, of course, and also the little diamond The Coach House, in Cupertino, where one can find Tequila Los Abuelos. While at the latter facility, I stumbled across a bottle of Amaro Nonino, perhaps my favorite Italian amaro. I considered bringing it with me, but I knew that Nonino was available via Special Liquor Order — aka SLO — in Pennsylvania. “I’ll just order it when I get home,” I said. “It’s been years since I’ve special ordered anything. Surely they’ve improved the process by now. How painful can it be?”

It turns out the answer is “Embarassingly painful” (more…)

This past week the Petes were both in Cupertino for a visit. The last few times I’ve been out there, I’ve been told to find a donut shop called Stan’s that is close to our normal Cupertino hotel. Because I am lazy and morally suspect, I never managed to do this. On this trip though, we girded our loins and made ourselves get out there one morning. So here is a shout out to Stan’s. If you are in the Bay Area and you don’t get donuts there, you are a fool.
(more…)