Caledonia Whisky & Co. named Brazil's best bar for 2026

Caledonia Whisky & Co. has been named Best Bar in Brazil at the 2026 Melhores da Taça awards, Brazil's national bar and beverage prize, beating entries from every region of the country.

The result was announced on 14 September at the opening of Salão Abrasel, the hospitality trade fair held at São Paulo's Bienal Pavilion. Organiser Prazeres da Mesa magazine counted more than 16,000 public votes across 45 categories this year, up from the award's first edition in 2025.

Inside Caledonia Whisky & Co.

A whisky room beat the cocktail bars to the national title, and Brazil noticed.

Caledonia sits on Rua Vupabussu in Pinheiros, a bar, bottle shop and tasting room grown out of Cão Engarrafado, a whisky blog its founders ran for five years before opening the physical space. The room stocks roughly 160 labels, from supermarket blends to a Macallan Reflexion, split into bourbon, rye, Irish and single malt flights for side-by-side tasting.

The kitchen leans British, built around a Cullen Skink smoked haddock soup, and the bar pours an exclusive imperial stout aged in whisky barrels from Cervejaria Dádiva. Cocktails come from Rodolfo Bob, an award-winning bartender whose drinks also picked up two category wins of their own this year: Best Espresso Martini went to SubAstor and Best Old Fashioned and Best Mocktail both went to Tan Tan, two other Pinheiros addresses.

Melhores da Taça rewards bars beyond São Paulo

The prize also crowned regional winners: Boteco Caju Limão in Brasília for the Centro-Oeste, Purgatório Bar in Salvador for the Nordeste, Arkana in Manaus for the Norte and Gambito Bar in Porto Alegre for the Sul, alongside São Paulo's own The Punch Bar for the Sudeste. Moela took Best Boteco and EAP – Empório Alto dos Pinheiros took Best Beer Bar.

Brazil's whisky shelves have filled out fast over the past decade, with imports and single-malt launches such as Nikka's Taketsuru Pure Malt Essentials, which reached the US market this year, pulling drinkers toward bourbon and single malt without pushing cachaça off the menu.

Rachel Louise, of W São Paulo, was named Best Bartender, and the magazine highlighted a record number of female winners across its wine, beer and cocktail categories this year. Brazil's hospitality boom is not confined to bars: in Rio, the Copacabana Palace's new restaurant Lumio opens from November with 38 seats.

Caledonia is open Tuesday to Saturday evenings and still runs the classroom sessions that started as blog meetups, now formal tastings for people who want the five-whisky flight explained rather than just poured. The win puts a neighbourhood whisky room, not a hotel bar or an established cocktail name, at the top of a prize that is itself still only in its second year.