Carrefour bought about 30 Makro stores in Brazil.
Here in the countryside the liquor stores are open, just barred the entrance. More beer or cachaça is sold here, the habit of whisky, wodka and wine became secondary if you compare with beer but it has a specific niche.
Cachaça is internally called "pinga". At the time of slavery, slaves were using a huge cauldron of sugar cane to manufacture sugar. The hot steam rose and hit the ceiling. There it accumulated and formed drops that later "fell, dripped, droppped down". The slaves wanted to drink water so they reached out their hands to catch these supposedly falling drops of water. The colonial masters began to realize that the slaves were getting drunk. This is the root story of the "drip".
Basically it is ethyl alcohol. The root difference between cachaça, pharmaceutical alcohol and fuel alcohol (ethanol) is the gradation. When there was no regulation on the alcoholic percentage, there were cachaças with more than 80% to 90% alcohol, several people died of cirrhosis.
