A relative just gave me a bottle of this, which they’d purchased for 7 USD in Paraguay. It was sold to them as “Paraguayan rum.” It’s 80 proof and claims 12 years age in bourbon barrels, “calidad de exportación.” The taste is definitely industrial, waaaay closer to “only seven dollars!” than to what one might expect of an export quality 12YO aged cane spirit. I can’t find any English-language info about this stuff–does anyone have any pointers?
This is going to sound trite, but you have to go where the information is and meet it on its own terms. Google Translate in a browser (right-click, translate) has brought me untold rewards that I’d never known about if I’d relied only English language sources.
YMMV.
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Caña Paraguaya was traditionally made from either cane juice or, much more commonly, a rich cane syrup made by boiling down the juice over an open fire (this was much more stable and easy to transport to the distillery). The syrup was mixed with a little heat-clarified bitter orange juice, water and yeast and fermented in bull’s hides stretched on wooden frames, a set up one still occasionally finds in Oaxaca. The resulting “aloja” was distilled in one pass through a classic alembic (with still-head and condensing coil) to proof, which was 50% abv +/- one or two percent. This was bottled without further reduction or aging. The product, made in hundreds of village distilleries, was praised by foreign travelers–the few that Paraguay got, anyway–for its purity and consistency.
Around 1890, European, chiefly French, distillers started arriving, much like they did in Chile, bringing in newer, more efficient stills and emphasizing oak aging. The traditional style seems to have persisted until the late 1940s, when alcohol was made a government monopoly. That seems to have been the ned of the small, village distilleries and much of the quality. Today it is still made from cane syrup, but mostly in large distilleries using column stills and it seems that things like boiled bitter orange juice, bull’s hides and alembics are in exceedingly short supply. But the monopoly ended a while back and there are starting to be craft/artisanal distilleries, and who knows.
If you can track down Cesar Samaniego’s 1936 Caña de Azúcar y Caña Paraguaya (published in Paraguay, of course), that pretty much details the traditional spirit. For the modern one, the Wikipedia page is pretty helpful.
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So, these bitter oranges… are they Laraha?
No, it seems to be the “apepu,” a local varietal that is a little less bitter and less sour than the standard Seville: Paraguay bittersweet sour orange | Givaudan Citrus Variety Collection at UCR
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Thanks. I figured it had to be a local varietal. But you never know what kind of species have been introduced into other regions.
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