No, it’s not just rum

While it's sometimes merely described as a Brazilian rum, cachça (ca-SHA-sa) has a bit more nuance than that.

While rum is generally made from molasses, cachça is made directly from fermented sugarcane juice. This allows the spirit to retain more of an earthy, grassy quality than rum. Additionally, because there are no regulations on the type of wood cachça has to be aged in, Brazilains take advantage of the fact that the Amazon rainforest is home to over 12,000 different types of wood. This means that while the spirit can only come from Brazil, there are literally thousands of subtle variations of the spirit produced.