On a sweltering afternoon inside a small taproom in São Paulo, a single word on the taplist caught my attention. Among the cornucopia of indigenous fruits listed as ingredients, one was particularly perplexing: caju. Curious, I asked for the translation or explanation, and was told: “It’s a cashew”. The beer tasted nothing like nuts, though. No wonder, because it wasn’t a cashew nut. It was a cashew apple.
After my first sip, I was hooked and had a thought: global brewers on the lookout for new exciting flavors with sustainability in mind, should be looking to brew with caju.
The unknown familiarity
Cashew, the nut, has enjoyed a run of popularity over the last several years as more consumers and nutritionists seek out superfoods. The crescent shaped, easily halved nut is used in butters, milk, and all manners of dishes. As ubiquitous as it is in snack packs and mixed cans, the cashew nut is actually a relatively small seed in a shell attached to a large juicy fruit, which is technically the fibrous stem of the cashew tree. People call it cashew apple, or caju in its homeland of Brazil.
It’s also considered a waste of nut production. Since the cashew production industry is interested in the nut only, the fruit is considered redundant and discarded. Every single nut generates fibrous waste of approximately 10-12 times larger in volume.
Brazil and India are the world’s leading cashew producers. Brazil produces about 330,000 metric tons of cashew nuts, which equals 2.7 million metric tons of cashew apples per year, with only 12 percent of them being processed. Caju juice production accounts for up to 8 percent. The probiotic juice is consumed as is and considered a minor superfood. It can also be used in cocktails like the Caju Amigo.
The flavor of caju is intriguing and complex. Think of a persimmon having a child with passionfruit. It is sweet, redolent of pink grapefruit, pleasantly tart, and mouthwateringly tangy at the same time. It lends itself perfectly to Brazil’s popular Catharina Sour beer style, a kettle sour featuring local fresh fruits.
One of the defining features of caju is a slight sulfuric whiff, not dissimilar to New Zealand hops like Nelson Sauvin, Motueka, or Riwaka. It is highly recognizable to most beer drinkers, but difficult to describe. This is one reason why it works so well in IPAs. With all the flavorful riches of the fruit, it’s mind-boggling to think it is mostly going to a compost dump.
Cajuring the magic
Brazilian breweries utilize the fruit because it’s cheap, the flavor is highly enjoyable and it is instantly recognizable locally. That seems to do the trick: beers containing the ingredient pop up regularly in taprooms and at competitions across the country. Cervejaria Unika, located in Rancho Queimado of the Brazilian State of Santa Catarina, was awarded gold for its “Caju e Pitanga” in the Catharina Sour category and silver in the best of show for the same beer in 2022’s Concurso Brasileiro de Cervejas, one of Latin America’s biggest competitions. Three other beers with caju received medals in the 2023 edition of the competition.
Daniel Diehl, the head brewer of Brazil’s Cervejaria Narcose, explains how he first took caju into the realm of international collaboration.
“The beer with caju came to be as a collab with Sebastian Sauer from Freigeist Bierkultur of Germany,” he says. “We agreed on Gose, a style that he is used to brewing, and I haven’t brewed one yet, with a twist of adding a Brazilian fruit. The drinkers’ feedback was very positive. This is one of our most famous beers, it sells quite well, and we do yearly versions of it — one with Scotch bonnet peppers grown around here and one with ginger.”
Given caju’s funky flavor, it would also work well in a saison recipe, says Diehl.
In the United States caju still remains an obscure ingredient.
“We spend a lot of time letting our curiosity guide us and lead us down new paths, especially in the world of fruit,” says Bret Kollmann Baker, the chief operating officer at Ohio’s Urban Artifact. Whether we use YouTube, first-hand travel, or through word-of-mouth from our suppliers, if there is a new-to-us fruit out there we try to get our hands on it. Caju specifically was great as it hit a couple of key things necessary for success: it’s sustainable and relatively readily available and cheap, and the flavor intensity is high. And the fact that it would otherwise be a waste stream is amazing.”
Caju has also caught the eye of homebrewers. Lukas Thomann, a Swiss homebrewer, says he was intrigued by caju juice available on supermarket shelves and worked it into his version of Catharina Sour.
“Drinking a bottle of juice over several days helped me to get a good impression on what layers of flavor caju could contribute,” he said. “Personally, the beer was above my expectations.”
Lost in translation
Will the fruit also put a spell on a larger group of beer drinkers?
“There’s a wonderful amount of customers who are down for anything we make, no matter how weird, like garlic, mushroom, asparagus, onions, tomatoes,” says Baker. “At the end of the day, if you want it to be a success, you need to have it rooted in flavors or concepts that people already understand. Mixing the caju with guava and mango, and calling it ‘tropical’ creates an understandable foundation for people to relate to.”
Still, he says, caju is hurt by the English translation, “cashew apple”.
“People think it’s two things combined, being cashew and apple, and that is most definitely not the case,” he says. “So in this instance calling it by its local name, Caju is preferred, but that also has its own intrinsic hurdles to climb in a country where the majority of people speak only English.”
Thomann agrees saying that when he served his beer to family and friends and was able to explain caju it was well received. “When I sent the beer to local competitions, comments were more cautious, like ‘something different’, ‘interesting’, but eventually it did not get good ratings. I’m uncertain if it was the beer itself or the caju though.”
Outpacing the time
In Brazil, cashew harvest season runs from November to January. If the nut is removed from the fruit, its shelf-life is reduced to six hours. With the nut intact, packaged, and stored at 41°F (5°C), the shelf-life of caju can vary from four to 21 days. After arriving at the processing plant, caju is deep frozen at 1.4°F (-17°C ) allowing it to be kept all year long for processing.
Brewers in the Northeastern states of Brazil have access to very cheap fresh fruit; for brewers like Diehl in the South, juice is preferred. Urban Artifact uses caju purée for the added pop of color and flavor from the fruit skin, in addition to the juice.
Researchers reported that gas chromatography−mass spectrometry analysis of a Brazilian cashew apple revealed numerous volatiles, including esters (40% of all volatiles) and terpenes, Limonene, and Bergamotene among them (20% of all volatiles). The use of hop terpenes extracted by the supercritical CO2 process has gained a certain following among IPA-focused breweries in recent years.
I wonder if extracting terpenes from a waste product can be worth investigating by the companies currently producing oil extract. Who knows, maybe we will see caju extracts coming to the market shortly, but that’s the space for scientific experiments, not excited geeky speculation.
Since the plant requires a frost-free tropical climate, planting in the United States is limited to extreme south Florida, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. With no commercial production in the United States yet, cashews are grown in botanical collections and private landscapes, creating a unique opportunity for breweries in those areas to reach out and explore the collaborative prospects, turning something people will get rid of into beer. Flavorsome and sustainable beer, for that matter.
Wherever or however brewers can procure caju, it will save the fruit from landfills, promote sustainability and upcycling, cut costs, and introduce drinkers to something fun and exciting.
Maybe, just maybe, a cashew apple can become the apple of the brewer’s eye.
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