Novo Fogo’s zero-waste cachaça distillery in Morretes, Brazil

When you take a walk through our cane fields, you’ll gaze upward at towering coastal mountains covered by an emerald blanket of trees. When you reach the last row of sugarcane, you’ll be just a mango’s throw from the edge of this jungle. In our ecosystem, balance matters. We depend on the forest to clean the air so our sugarcane tastes like its terroir – tropical fruits, flowers, and the sea breeze. Because we don’t use insecticides, we depend on the birds to eat the insects in our cane fields. We also depend on consistent weather patterns in our microclimate, so that we can harvest our cane annually. If this balance breaks down, so will our business and the livelihoods of our team members and their families.

Growing sugarcane in the Atlantic Forest demands respect for this pristine place.

A barrel aging room at the Novo Fogo distillery. The majority of our barrels are American oak.

As a defense against the humid environment and wood-eating insects, many tropical tree species have evolved to have very hard and dense wood. This has made them excellent choices for construction, flooring, furniture, and storage for liquids like cachaça. Brazil’s population growth over the last century has accelerated the logging of these hardwoods and their employment to make humans happy. In addition, the recent push for increased ethanol production and cattle grazing have added to the justifications needed to cut down large swaths of rainforest. As enforcement across the massive country of Brazil is difficult, illegal logging remains a persistent problem.

One of the many qualities that make cachaça unique is that it can be aged in a variety of native Brazilian hardwoods. These woods can bring a wide range of extraordinary flavors and aromas to aged cachaça. Some can indeed be quite delicious. But many of these tree species are now threatened, having fallen victim to the overall problems of deforestation and forest degradation in Brazil.

Unfortunately, the sustainability of Brazilian woods is not a widely-acknowledged priority for many cachaça producers. As long as market demand grows for cachaça aged in native Brazilian woods, these trees will be removed from Brazil’s forests in both legal and illegal ways. Cachaça is one of the emissaries of Brazilian culture to the rest of the world, and cachaças aged in Brazilian woods expressions carelessly aged in threatened wood species carry an implicit message that is contrary to Brazil’s sustainability efforts.

For us at Novo Fogo, primarily using oak offers an alternative solution to the problem of scarce Brazilian woods. White oak (American and European) is the most popular wood for aging many types of spirits worldwide, including Brazilian cachaça. Oak is water tight yet suitably porous, contains tasty compounds like vanillin, and is renewable and abundantly available at reasonable costs. We primarily use repurposed American oak barrels for our aging processes; our Kentucky barrels are sanded to remove the bourbon char and expose fresh wood and then are retoasted to our specifications.

But isn’t it sacrilegious to use a non-Brazilian wood for a Brazilian spirit? We don’t think so. Many categories of international distilled spirits use oak for barrel-aging: scotch, Irish whiskey, Japanese whiskey, rum, tequila, various brandies, and even fortified wines like sherry and port. Oak’s physical properties are ideal for aging spirits, its taste of vanilla and toffee is undeniably delightful, and its sources are extensively renewable. Oak truly is the world’s favorite wood for aging spirits, and for good reason.

By American law, bourbon distillers must use new American oak barrels for their aging processes. Once the finished bourbon leaves the barrel, that cask can no longer be used for aging bourbon again. Thus, these distillers have a large supply of used American oak barrels available for the rest of the spirits world to purchase (at a lower price than new) and to use. And what is more sustainable than reusing your neighbor’s surplus? We are proud to be part of this global recycling program with tasty results.

Brazil is no stranger to the benefits of used oak barrels. Portuguese colonists first brought small oak barrels filled with European wines and spirits to Brazil in the 1500s, so oak is no more an intruder to Brazil than the colonists themselves. Over the centuries, both cachaça and other spirits like Brazilian malt whisky enjoyed time spent in the friendly oak barrels; by the twenty-first century, oak had solidified its place as the preferred wood for aging cachaça in Brazil. This historical trajectory is an accomplishment in distilled spirits sustainability that we cherish.

Our American oak barrels come from the Four Roses and Heaven Hill companies in Kentucky, USA.

An araribá (Brazilian zebrawood) tree in the forest nearby the Novo Fogo distillery in Morretes, Brazil.

We believe that producing, promoting, and enjoying Brazilian wood-aged spirits must be paired with a push for legal and sustainable sourcing. With carefully-managed forestry practices, it is possible to plant rare trees in their native habitat and sustainably harvest a small portion of them for commercial use. This process begins with a landowner’s proposal to plant trees and harvest a percentage of them after a certain period of time. The proposal must be approved by a state government agency, and the requirements for harvesting planted trees differ from state to state. In our state of Paraná, the agency that approves sustainable forestry plans is called the Instituto Água e Terra (IAT). Inspectors come to verify that the plantation is in line with the management plan and, after a certain period of time, an approved (small) number of trees can be harvested for commercial use.

Harvesting Brazilian woods for commercial use in barrels or any other application can be sustainable if a government-approved plan is in place and fewer trees are harvested than are planted. When a tree is planted in its native habitat, eventually it will generate seeds. These seeds can be spread by the wind, by animals, or in our case, by the hands of everyone involved in The Un-Endangered Forest project. A single tree can eventually become dozens. As a result, selectively removing only a fraction of a tree plantation can both generate economic gain and help to restore the forest. Of course, Novo Fogo’s aim is not to cut down any of the trees we plant, but to let them thrive naturally and to enrich the forest ecosystem.

Our single araribá barrel was made from reclaimed wood.

Two of our amburana barrels.

A Documento de Origem Florestal (DOF) from our cooper. Sensitive information has been redacted for privacy.

But Brazil is a complicated place, and gray areas allow loopholes and trickery to commonly influence the market for Brazilian woods. The following scenario is not uncommon: some guys go into the forest and chop down a valuable, threatened tree, which is against the law. Then they call the police and report that an endangered tree was felled in the forest. The authorities come, remove the wood, and impound the lumber for a few months. The wood is then offered for sale at a public auction with official papers that certify the wood as “legally-sourced” – simply because it was sold by the government! The same bad guys who illegally cut the tree in the first place show up at the auction and buy the timber, which is now certified as “legal” wood that they can subsequently sell with official documentation. But by looking at the DOF, we can see that the wood was bought at one of these auctions, and thus may have had a questionable origin. A responsible cooper should not buy this wood. A responsible cachaça producer should ask their cooper to see DOFs before buying Brazilian wood barrels and should verify the source of the wood that is listed on the DOF.

If this sounds mind-boggingly complicated, it’s only because IT IS mind-boggingly complicated. It’s difficult to know whom to trust and how to verify their claims, and perhaps it’s even unreal that you must verify the validity of certification documents! But you should do what you can, anyway, because your insistence on verification will gradually improve the industry’s corporate practices.

Whether you’re buying a piece of furniture made out of Brazilian wood or a bottle of cachaça aged in Brazilian wood, we implore you to ask the producer for proof that the wood was legally sourced. A DOF serves as legal proof. Only by planting trees, protecting forests from deforestation, and using responsible management practices will Brazil’s precious forests recover and thrive.

Dr. Silvia Ziller explains proper technique for planting tree seedlings at the Novo Fogo property.

Dr. Sílvia Ziller earned a MS in Silviculture and a PhD in Nature Conservation and, over the last 20 years, has dedicated her career to the management of invasive species. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Horus Institute for Environmental Conservation and Development in Florianópolis, Brazil, and a fellow of the Ashoka Social Entrepreneurs. Sílvia is a Board member of the Global Invasive Species Program and the Board Coordinator for the Nature Conservancy’s Invasive Species Program of South America. She believes that environmental conservation depends on the proper understanding of the needs of human life and requires an investment in social development and community building.

Sílvia and our distillery’s founder, Fulgencio Torres Viruel, track their friendship to their college days, so she was happy to take a look at this crazy idea from a bunch of cachaça-makers in Morretes. Immediately after setting foot on our property, she noticed that the rows of palm trees flanking the road to our distillery don’t belong: they are Australian palm trees, not native palms from the Atlantic Forest. (Our bad.) Today, after Sílvia straightened us out, in between each Aussie palm, a short but steadily-growing Brazilian palm sapling is reaching skyward. When these local palms are big enough, we’ll remove the Australian ones.

Sílvia’s expertise guides us through the complexity of the forest, and the palm tree debacle reveals that counterintuitive solutions are occasionally necessary to do the ecologically-correct thing. Sometimes you have to cut down an invasive species so that native species can thrive in their natural habitat.

As our scientific advisor, Sílvia selects the species of trees that we should plant in the Atlantic Forest. She instructs our Novo Fogo team and our partners how, when, and where to plant trees depending on the species. She coordinates with other botanists in Curitiba, Paraná, to collect seeds from trees in the forest, and she oversees our nursery operation to foster the seeds to seedlings until they’re ready to be planted.

In short, Sílvia provides expertise and authority so that we, as cachaça producers, can better understand the full environmental picture and become a more responsible and sustainable company.

Dr. Silvia Ziller ensures that we’re planting tree species that are native to the Atlantic Forest.

First-stage species like pitanga trees will provide shade for intermediate-stage hardwoods like jequitibá trees.

When we first came up with the idea to plant trees in the forest, we thought we’d plant a ton of them. Trees everywhere! Acres of forests! A tree for every bottle sold!

But with Sílvia’s guidance, we learned that our local environment was better suited to a tree-planting approach that prioritized quality over quantity. In fact, there is a huge risk to a corporate policy of planting trees without knowing precisely what kind of trees are being planted, where, and how. If the prevailing logic is to plant as many trees as possible, there is a risk of putting non-native trees in the ground and they may disrupt the local ecosystems.

Most of our land in Morretes is forested. We plant rare hardwood trees like jequitibá under the forest canopy.

We didn’t have empty land to convert to forest by planting acres of trees. But we did have access to the recovering Atlantic Forest—land that once was native forest, then was cut down for agriculture, and is now slowly recovering back to forest. These recuperating forests are sorely lacking in keystone hardwood species that grow as second-stage forests, including some of the very species that are used for barrel-aging cachaça.

With Silvia’s guidance, we made a list of native species we could plant in Morretes, sourced seedlings from a government-run nursery, and began planting them on our property. In open spaces, we plant shade-creating species like ingá to create good habitat for second-growth hardwoods that will need shade; the second-growth trees are then planted a few years later under the shade of the first growth trees. And where shade already exists — among the 75 acres of recovering forest on our property — we plant trees like jequitibá, a staple hardwood used for resting cachaça but today a rare and endangered species.

When you visit our distillery, you can plant your own tree sapling, marked by a little plaque with your name on it. We hope you’ll return to Morretes often to see how much it has grown.

The seeds we harvest in the forest are raised at this nursery at Ekôa Park.

We source seedlings from this government-run nursery nearby.

TREE SPECIES WE SOURCED FROM A LOCAL NURSERY

WILD TREE SPECIES WE LOCATED IN THE FOREST

Marcelo Brotto is a botanist who works at the Botanical Conservatory in Curitiba and he has expert knowledge about the Atlantic Forest. Marcelo uses special climbing equipment to scale the rare trees we find in the wild and collect their seeds.

We are cataloging rare tree species in the forest so that we can harvest their seeds, like this jequitibá seed pod.

We are steadily filling the open spaces on our property with native tree seedlings.

Novo Fogo is a carbon-negative company. Calculating the numbers to make this claim took us years of research and collaboration with multiple individuals and NGOs that have extensive expertise in this field. The agency called Native is our primary partner in these calculations. They are a reputable NGO that we selected after doing a lot of research; we think that the Sierra Club made a persuasive case for why Native is legit, so you can take it from them. In addition, we sometimes make carbon offset purchases through Native to balance out extracurricular things like the flights of distillery visitors who travel from far away. Through them, we support projects like the Seneca Meadows Landfill in upstate New York, which transforms landfill methane gases into electricity. The calculations for the carbon absorptions of our existing and developing forests and cane plantation are more complex. According to Dr. Sílvia Ziller’s survey of the forested areas on our property, she states that:

“These forest remnants are secondary growth, which means at some point in the past these areas were cleared, then the forest grew back. The forest structure varies very little and is mostly composed of two tree stories, the highest trees reaching about 18 meters in some areas, and only 10-12 meters in other areas. The mature Atlantic Forest has four stories and reaches up to 35 meters. Despite their young age, these forest remnants are in good condition and are well-developed. The undergrowth is not dense and is easy to walk through, as the shade is dense. There are many palmito juçara plants (Euterpe edulis) and a high diversity of life forms. This is the ideal environment to receive the seedlings The Un-Endangered Forest project is going to produce, as these are the species that will develop into the mature forest. From a carbon offset standpoint, these forests will be capturing carbon for a long time and may contribute to the carbon neutral goal of Novo Fogo.”

We also depend on the calculations done by a local NGO named Sociedade de Pesquisa em Vida Selvagem (Society for Research on Wildlife, or SVPS). The folks at SVPS in Curitiba have calculated that secondary growth Atlantic Forests in our area sequester between 0.2 and 0.64 tons of carbon per acre per year, depending on the plant density and other factors. If we apply that to the 75 acres of forest on our land, we arrive at a conservative estimate of between 15 and 48 tons of carbon per year absorbed by our growing forests. Our organic sugarcane fields don’t contribute much to offsetting our carbon footprint, but they offer some important considerations for how an agricultural business like ours can reduce its carbon emissions through its farming practices. First, we farm organically, which means that we don’t buy chemical herbicides or pesticides that caused carbon emissions in their manufacture. Second, we don’t burn our sugarcane fields before harvesting. While standard practice in many sugarcane-harvesting operations in order to remove the leaves and underbrush around the cane stalks, burning sugarcane phytomass emits C02 into the atmosphere. Third, we don’t use diesel harvesting machines; we rely on the talent and hard work of our machete-wielding field team. As our understanding of the diverse and complex botanical science on our property grows, we will continue to refine our calculations. Even in the absence of exact numbers, we nonetheless think that it’s worth calling attention to the fact that landowners can make a positive impact on the environment by preserving forests in addition to reducing emissions.

These aerial photos taken in 2016 show our distillery and sugarcane field properties. Most of the land we own is blanketed by recovering Atlantic Forest that absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.

As of spring 2023, the Un-Endangered Forest Project has grown to include 60 properties around the Morretes area.

Since the project started, the spirit of reforestation has grown beyond our own property lines. There is a small but influential group of landowning entrepreneurs around our town Morretes who are passionate about living and working in harmony with the Atlantic Forest. In addition to being really fun to visit, our area offers a window onto a coexistence with Brazil’s nature. These folks share that spirit, and they’re planting seedlings from our project on their land as a part of The Un-Endangered Forest project. Here are just a handful of the 60 properties that are planting trees:

Ekôa Park is a 600-acre nature reserve and ecotourism park that educates visitors about the history, culture, and science of the Atlantic Forest through fun and engaging activities. The park plays a special role in The Un-Endangered Forest project by raising the seeds we find in the wild in their nursery. We love bringing our travel groups to Ekôa Park to do the ropes course through the jungle canopy, to fly down the zipline, to walk the interpretive trails, to rapel from a hot-air balloon, and to engage in educational activities. Their restaurant is also one of the best in town and makes a delicious Caipirinha with our Silver Cachaça.

Pousada Graciosa has been a supporter of The Un-Endangered Forest initiative from the beginning, helping us discover, learn, and execute our plan. The pousada has transformed 42 acres of its property into a private reserve that is legally protected and may never be developed; 88 species of birds have been registered on this preserve and are now protected. The owners of Pousada Graciosa are the type of kindred spirits that fuel our ambitions and make us feel supported in our quest. You should also try their Porto de Cima beer!

Two other resorts, Casas di Monte Ecopousada (plus its adjoining restaurant, O Celeiro Gastronomia) and Pousada Hakuna Matata own land also dominated by secondary growth forests. Sílvia’s survey of their land promised lots of potential places to plant native and endangered trees and they are starting their journey with us.