Beija.

It’s a Portuguese verb meaning “to touch with the lips as a sign of love.”

It also happens to be the name of a new type of rum.

I want you to remember that name, because I think you are going to be hearing a lot about it over the next year or two, especially if you live on the east coast. And not just from me. If all goes well it will be the next hot thing with the trendy bar and night-club crowd, with Beija-made drinks taking on the Mojito for the title of Most Popular Latin American Cocktail.

I’ll get back to Beija in just a moment, though. First, I want to talk first about dreams.

Most of us harbor a secret dream in our heart. We might not talk about it very often, but it’s there, lying just below the surface like a shark in the water, just waiting for that right moment to rear its head and remind us of what’s missing from our life. We find ourselves thinking about it during loose moments and odd hours, wondering what life would be like if we only had the money or the time or the guts to give it a shot.

For many of us, that’s as far as it ever goes. We spend the rest of our lives wondering “What if?” and wishing we’d acted when we’d had the chance to do so. Ever wonder why that is? Why we have this burning passion to do something with our lives and the closest we ever come to doing it is thinking what if? What’s with that, anyway?

And what the hell does that have to with Beija? I hear you ask.

Beija is a small start-up company run by Kevin Beardsley, 24, and Steve Diforio, 23, two regular guys who grew up together in Weston, Connecticut. While spending his senior year at Duke University working a finance internship at the Bank of America in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Beardsley fell in love with drinks made from cachaca, a type of rum made from cane sugar, rather than the more common molasses-based rums. Beardsley dreamed of finding a way to making his own Americanized-version of cachaca and introducing it in the States.

Unlike most of us, Beardsley didn’t stop there. Enlisting the help of long-time friend Diforio, the two of them set out in 2005 to make their dream a reality. They tasted cachaca samples mailed to them from distilleries in Brazil, signed a contract with the one they liked best, arranged to have the rum shipped to France to be bottled and then imported into the U.S. They spent the summer and fall of 2006 approaching bartenders in upscale restaurants and bars in the Boston area, talking about Beija and their dreams for the company. The effort began to pay off and it wasn’t too long before they had a distributor, M.S. Walker, willing to carry their product.

Sounds like they had it easy, doesn’t it? What I didn’t mention was how they financed the whole thing using credit cards and part-time jobs. Or the fact that they knew nothing at all about the liquor business when they started. They simply had a dream and the guts and determination to get out there and make it happen.

The company has been getting some good press recently, including a very nice article in the front of the Living Arts section of the Boston Globe this past weekend, which is how I found out about them. (You can read that same article online here.)

The article caught my eye because Steve happens to be the son of my literary agent, Robert Diforio, but that’s not what made me want to write about it here. Rather it was the fact that, unlike so many of the rest of us, these two guys weren’t willing to settle for “What if?” but got off their butts and chased after their dream, learning as they went. Regardless of how it all turns out in the end, that’s something that they can be proud of for the rest of their lives and my hat’s off to them.

What dream are you hiding? What’s keeping you from going after it?

(You can learn more about Beija at the company website.)