AGUARDENTE DESTILA DA RIBEIRA
Evangelista de Oliveira
FOZ DO BESTEIRO
964 078 155
37°23’26.64”N 8°39’21.80”W
Evangelista de Oliveira lives in Monchique, but it was on a hill at Foz do Besteiro, his birthplace, that he built one of the most modern distilleries in the borough, close to the waters of the river Grande, on a row of houses where people and animals had already lived and where there had even been a grocer’s and a textile shop, where he installed a distillery with two 120-litre boilers and a system to directly empty the distilled medronho mash, that would simplify a good part of the work and allow him to decrease the time between one boiling process and another.
Even though it was built from scratch in the 21st century and is spotless, the Foz do Besteiro cellar recreates a number of aspects of the old distilleries. For example, the tanks are made of metal, as they should be, but are lined with wood to look like the original ones, The tiles, instead of new, are the originals from the old house, with a simple fitting system, and the oven bricks have also been recycled. “It is for pleasure, I like bringing friends here”, explains the producer of the Ribeira Distillery.