NOVO FOGO

It’s unusual to find a distillery that centers the concept of terroir in its messaging; even more uncommon is one that is certified carbon negative and committed to removing 36 species of native trees from the threatened list. That is just a couple of highlights in the story that Novo Fogo, a distillery located near the town of Morretes within Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, is trying to tell.

The Novo Fogo brand was started in 2010 by Romanian native Dragos Axinte, whose family moved to and settled in Seattle when he was 18 years old, and his wife Emily Axinte. A previous business venture brought Dragos to Brazil, though he’d already had an emotional connection to the place — as a child, he’d read books about and had become obsessed with Brazilian football stars like Pelé, and then more broadly the Brazilian football world. As an adult working in the country, however, it was cachaça that drew him in.

While the Novo Fogo brand started in 2010, the founders did not immediately have a distillery to work out of. They looked all over Brazil to find one but were firm on having it meet some particular requirements, being zero-waste and USDA-certified among them. Fulgencio Torres Viruel was the founder and president of the distillery that they ultimately acquired in 2015, and he partnered with the Axintes as well as Dr. Agenor Maccari Jr., who specializes in post-harvest food technology, particularly in beverages. Maccari joined the team as the master distiller. Cachaça is the most popular alcoholic beverage from the country of Brazil, whose government defines it as a spirit distilled from fermented sugarcane juice with an alcoholic

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strength between 38 and 54 percent by volume and an allowance of up to six grams of added sugar per liter. It was introduced to the country by the Portuguese in the 16th century when settlers brought with them sugarcane cuttings and copper pot stills and grew its production over the next several decades through large sugar plantations. Centuries later, industrial scale production was implemented, and there developed two broad styles of the spirit: ‘traditional’ style, which is made on copper pot stills in small batches, and ‘industrial,’ made on continuous column systems.

Novo Fogo’s production would certainly be considered traditional, as in harkening back to pre-industrial times. They grow their own sugarcane on the land that houses the facility in Floresta Atlântica, or the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, without use of any chemical herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers, and any sugarcane they use not grown on their own property is purchased from farming operations within Brazil who function with a similar ethos. Their field team hand-harvests the cane with machetes in lieu of machine harvesting or field burning. Within hours of harvest, and without pasteurization, the cane is pressed to begin the first step of production and transferred to the distilling building on the property.

The specific kind of sugarcane used by Novo Fogo for their cachaça is very important to the operation: Currently, they use a varietal called cana havianinha (ah-vye-ahNEE-nya) for their distillation, but they are actively experimenting with other varietal plantings to see what, if any, would make for a better choice. “The main concern for us is going to be general productivity, so a sugarcane varietal is robust enough to survive an organic agricultural operation because we don’t use any chemical interventions,” said Luke McKinley, marketing director for Novo Fogo. Certain characteristics like hardiness are generally needed for any varietal of sugarcane that Novo Fogo would consider farming on their property to use in their production, but they are also looking at other concerns. “I was asking our technical director Bruna here, what sort of qualities are you going to look for in that next cana havianinha substitute?” said McKinley. “And she joked that she’s looking for an aquatic species of sugarcane because it’s been so rainy and there's just been so much water in between the rows of sugarcane.”

Water-logged roots are a major concern for an organically farmed operation, as it presents abundant opportunity for fungus or rot to develop. Some of the varietals they’ve planted experimentally have shown early indications that they are more resistant than others, so those have been planted in larger quantities. Other less-promising varietals are turned over, and on and on they go with their experimentation. It’s a long process that will likely take decades but Novo Fogo clearly has every indication of creating a lasting entity in the region.

Farming your own raw materials on-site is a complicated endeavor that requires a huge amount of effort for the kind of return that you can expect, but Novo Fogo has anchored its brand on the terroir that they feel their

spirits exhibit. “There is sea salt in the air, there is kind of the funk of the grass, the lime blossoms, the passion fruit blossoms, banana blossoms, all those end up in the air, and they end up in the sugarcane so the sugarcane is sweet and it’s salty,” said Dragos. The character of their cachaça could be described as elegantly existing at the crossroads of savory and tropical. It’s because of this intimate tie to the land that Novo Fogo has invested so much into studying and experimenting with the varietals of cane they use. Not only are the farmers at Novo Fogo contending with a hilly, jungle-like location where they must grow sugarcane without chemical intervention, they’re also dealing with the ever-more-present effects of climate change. Weather patterns in the area were once quite predictable — usually a heavy rain cycle followed by a consistent dry period. Each year, however, they present as more and more erratic, sometimes even destructive, like a bomb cyclone that hit the coast of Brazil in 2020 and sent high winds sweeping over the distillery. “When high winds come through this area, it looks like a giant hand just smothered our sugarcane,” McKinley explained. “When that cane breaks there’s a little fissure in the cane that can pose a risk to the fermentation because bacteria and critters can get in to the cane, compromise the quality of the juice, and therefore compromise the quality of our fermentation.”

It’s the unfortunate catch-22 for people who commit themselves to engaging with agriculture in a more conscientious way: Typically, they are the ones who feel the most potent negative effects of climate change. Novo Fogo can access cane through partnering with farm distilleries around the country who they have worked with in the past, but the list is small and those operations are in much the same boat. It’s not as easy as going to the country’s bulk sugarcane processors and buying pasteurized juice. They have set up their business in such a way that working toward a better climate future isn’t just philanthropic, it’s essential for their survival.

The lineup of products released by Novo Fogo, which includes an American oak-aged cachaça, American oak and zebrawood-aged cachaça, American oak and Brazilian oakaged cachaça, and American oak and Brazilian teak-aged cachaça, is built around their silver cachaça, which is the base for all their aged expressions and canned cocktails. The silver cachaça starts with the sugarcane from the fields, which is harvested by hand

“There is sea salt in the air, there is kind of the funk of the grass, the lime blossoms, the passion fruit blossoms, banana blossoms, all those end up in the air, and they end up in the sugarcane so the sugarcane is sweet and it’s salty.”

DRAGOS AXINTE

Founder & CEO, Novo Fogo

and then pressed on site. The resulting juice is collected in a room where it’s put through a series of filters to remove particulates and, depending on the Brix measured, possibly dosed down with a bit of water. This is the furthest that they go with standardizing the juice prior to fermentation.

Novo Fogo’s fermentation relies on wild yeasts, but they don’t merely leave it up to those yeasts that are present in the air or on the stalks. At the beginning of every harvest cycle, the distillers make a starter, kind of like a sourdough or kombucha mother, wherein they take a bucketful of freshly harvested sugarcane juice and add to it a bit of lime juice to bring down the pH and some rice flour as a starchy medium for the wild yeast to latch onto. This starter is added to the first batch of sugarcane juice at the beginning of the harvest, and once that batch is fermented into sugarcane wine, a portion of that is taken and added back into the second batch of fresh juice that’s ready to ferment.

Their fermentations run quickly; because of the high sugar content inherent in freshly pressed juice, the process of fermenting almost always takes less time than it would for, say, barley and corn. They use fermenters with dimpled bands through which hot and cold water can run to maintain a consistent temperature during the process. In Novo Fogo’s case, their sugarcane juice ferments completely in 24 hours; the final result is about eight percent. The folks at the distillery also recognize that so much of the flavor that their cachaça exhibits is because of this crucial step. “The whole objective of this cachaça, which goes into barrels and becomes everything else — but [the silver expression] is kind of the purest representation of that — is that we want to preserve the flavor and the identity of the sugarcane, because it’s so clean, it’s so healthy,” said McKinley. “We process what this becomes very minimally.”

Once fermentation is complete, the wine is moved into three linked components — boiler, still, and chiller — the first of which is used to start the heating process. The distillation setup is organized to conserve as much energy as they can. Vapor is run back through the preheater with a serpentine pipe inside the vessel, so it arrives at the chiller already cooled somewhat, which they have calculated saves them about 20 percent of the energy they would use. The still is fueled with steam from a fire fed with bagaço or bagasse, the dried-up pulp leftover from the pressing of the sugarcane stalks. Steam from the bagasse-burning furnace heats the sugarcane wine in their pot still; they collect the center or hearts cut from that and recycle the remaining distillate to use as fuel, to start fires, or to use as a cleaning agent. One hundred and thirty liters of drinkable cachaça is yielded per batch on their 1,200-liter system. Following distillation, their silver cachaça is moved into inert stainless steel tanks to rest for one year. Following that rest period in stainless, they do not utilize chill-filtration for their cachaça.

A portion of Novo Fogo’s products see influence from wood via aging, which they say is reflective of its native country: According to the folks at Novo Fogo, the vast majority of cachaça consumed in Brazil is barrel-aged. They use American oak in some portion for all their aged spirits, but the sub-family of products dubbed the Two-Wood Series utilizes both American oak and native Brazilian woods to age their spirits, including zebrawood, Brazilian nut wood, and Brazilian teak. For this reason and many more, not least of which is the influence that Brazil’s rainforest has on the entire planet’s climate, Novo Fogo has been committed for years to a reforestation program that they’ve built into their business. The Un-Endangered Forest is a project that they created that “aims to reverse the journey towards extinction of several threatened native Brazilian tree species,” according to their website, by sourcing seeds and saplings of native and rare trees that are then fostered in their local nursery and planted on their property and partnering properties. This project has contributed to Novo Fogo’s carbon negative status via the offsetting of carbon output, coupled with their overall reduction in use.

You could say that the goal with Novo Fogo is to introduce a traditional Brazilian spirit, cachaça, to the North American market at an approachable price point and style, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but that would severely undercut the medley of missions that its founders have initiated. It seems that Novo Fogo is actually one of those rare breeds in this industry — a savvy and well-articulated brand that feels a genuine responsibility to do right by the land and community through which they have made their products.