Salvador launches Brazil's first cocktail festival
Forty-plus bars from Brazil, Italy, Colombia, Ecuador and beyond descend on Salvador's historic centre for a week of guest shifts, tastings and a cachaça-focused conference.
The first Salvador Cocktail Festival opens on 10 November, turning the UNESCO-listed streets of Bahia's historic centre into Brazil's newest stage for bar culture.
More than 40 bars take part in the week-long event, which runs to 16 November around Rua Chile and Rua Tira-Chapéu in Salvador's Centro Histórico. The street programme is free to attend.
Purgatório, a bar from local group Grupo Red, organises the festival through founders Peu Magalhães, Jonatan Albuquerque and Iryna Podusovska. The bar marks its fourth anniversary on 12 November with a run of guest shifts, timed to a year in which it has featured among the World's 50 Best Bars extended list.
We want people to taste Bahia, and also to get to know Bahia a little better.
International bars take over the city
From 13 November, visiting bartenders take over bars and restaurants across Salvador. The international line-up includes Drink Kong from Rome, Alquímico and Carmen from Cartagena, Código 86 from Quito and CoChinChina from Buenos Aires. Local venues SubAstor, Fifty Fifty, Shiro, Nosso Ipanema and Caledônia join the roster, alongside names more often associated with São Paulo's restaurant scene than Bahia's.
A delegation from the World's 50 Best Bars Academy's West and East Africa chapters also travels in: chairs Chris Beaney and Brian Owango, with bartenders Seraphine Afladey and Tapatheo Nyamekye from Ghana, and Elvis Ombongi and Kelvin Angoya from Kenya.
Programming blends tastings, producer visits and landmark tours with a public street celebration on Rua Chile, featuring food stalls and live music. A food donation drive runs alongside the festival, with proceeds going to a local social organisation.
A conference built around cachaça
The week closes with a two-day conference on 15 and 16 November at the Palacete Tira-Chapéu, with seminars on cocktail history, cachaça production, consumer trends, menu development and global ingredients and spirits.
Bahia's own pantry drives the drinks list: tropical fruit, cacao, coffee, coconut, licuri palm nut, honey and regional cachaças recur across menus built for the week. "We want people to taste Bahia, and also to get to know Bahia a little better," Albuquerque said.
For a city better known internationally for Carnival and Afro-Brazilian cuisine than for cocktails, the festival is a bid to put Salvador's bar scene on the same map as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo — this time pouring something distinctly Bahian.
