Novo Fogo Bar Strength Silver Cachaça is crafted for bartenders.
“We designed this product with bartenders in mind, as they value efficiency, knowledge, and leadership,” notes Dragos Axinte, CEO of Novo Fogo Cachaça. “The new Silver 1-liter bottle offers the ergonomics and economics to become a bartender’s favorite, while also serving as a flagbearer of cleaner business practices in our industry.”
With nearly 500 years of tradition and history as Brazil’s national spirit, the cachaça category has developed into a hugely diverse constellation of producers throughout the country. Novo Fogo is an ecologically sound, award-winning spirit, handcrafted in small batches at the company’s carbon negative, zero-waste distillery. We asked CEO Dragos Axinte to tell us more about the newly launched Bar Strength Silver Cachaça and the distilleries unwavering commitment to sustainability.
What should bartenders know about the cachaça category?
Three high-level things: Cachaça is old. Cachaça is diverse. Cachaça is agricultural. As the Western Hemisphere’s first distilled cane spirit, cachaça’s origins (around 1520) predate the first accounts of rum distillation in the Caribbean by nearly a century. This geographic and cultural diversity means that there is huge variety among cachaças due to unique growing conditions for sugarcane, approaches to fermentation, distillation techniques, and barrel-aging strategies. There is a lot to experience!
It’s important for bartenders to understand that cachaça is an agricultural spirit, in that it is produced from the juice of an unprocessed plant. When you taste cachaça, you’ll experience flavors that emanate from the place where the sugarcane was cultivated, without any additives or cooking or alteration. It tastes raw and alive, similar to other plant-based spirits (e.g. agave spirits, unaged brandies like pisco and singani, or eaux de vie). And for bartenders who care about beverage production as a matter of sustainability, the farming and cultivation methods for sugarcane make a big impact for the earth – and on the final distillate.
What are some important talking points bartenders should know when suggesting cachaça to their guests?
Cachaça (ka-sha-sah) is already a tricky word to pronounce for folks who are unfamiliar with the Portuguese language, so it’s a good idea to keep it simple, fun, and welcoming: Cachaça is a unique version of rum from Brazil. It’s distilled from fresh sugarcane juice instead of molasses, so it tastes more like fresh cane (but all the sugar is distilled out, and it’s dry, not sweet!). Like tequila, cachaça can be unaged, rested, or barrel-aged, so there’s a cachaça for all kinds of preferences!
Bartenders—Want to enter your Environmentally Friendly Cocktail in the Novo Fogo Bar Strength Cachaça Contest? Enter HERE.
Tell us more about Novo Fogo Bar Strength.
Novo Fogo Bar Strength Cachaça is our latest, high-proof silver cachaça in a 1-liter bottle format designed for the bar community. It has been reformulated to allow the service industry to find the elusive intersection between high-quality spirits and cocktail menu costs. The bottle redesign features a smaller, circular footprint (3.7” at its largest diameter), a taller neck (3.5”), and a slimmer midsection that fits easily in the well and is easier to handle throughout busy shifts.
As a business practice, Novo Fogo maintains a negative carbon footprint for its own actions through waste minimization, organic production, the ownership and management of forested land, a growing reforestation project for threatened tree species, and the purchase of carbon offsets. But leadership in a silo is ineffective in today’s increasingly connected and congested world, so we sought to understand and take responsibility for the carbon footprint of our entire supply chain. Calculations included activities by suppliers and distribution partners upstream and downstream of Novo Fogo’s own activities, such as the production of the glass bottles, labels, corks, and cases, ocean and land freight, distributor warehouse utilities and fuel, sales and delivery activities, etc.
Unsurprisingly, Novo Fogo’s activities generated only 21.5% of the total emissions created in the supply chain of this product; the rest were emitted by our suppliers (45.9%) and distribution network (32.6%). We totaled these numbers and purchased carbon offsets to bring the net to neutral for the entire supply chain of the Bar Strength Cachaça; the detailed calculations are included with each case.
Through Native, our offsets provider partner, our carbon offset purchases financially support a project that provides water filters for 2,000 coffee-growing families in Honduras, eliminating their need to cut and burn trees for boiling water. This ultimately preserves the fragile local forest habitat and thus satisfies two core tenets of Novo Fogo’s sustainability foundation: carbon management and forest preservation.
We also contribute $3 per case of all bottle sales to the brand’s Un-Endangered Forest project, a program that works to remove 36 species of native Brazilian trees from the threatened list. Each bottle is made from recycled glass and the neck wrap is repurposed from plastic collected from the streets of São Paulo, Brazil.
The higher-proof expression presents at 43% ABV in the bottle, after resting in chemically-inert stainless steel tanks for one year. The resulting effect of intensified tropical fruit flavors takes the leading role in a broad range of cocktails, from sours to tiki drinks and twists on classics.
What inspired this expression?
We love bars and bartenders! We heard from a bunch of folks we trust and revere who love mixing drinks with our Silver Cachaça. To make the bottle even easier, economical, and ergonomic for bartenders to use Novo Fogo in their wells, we redesigned it (more on that below). We also bumped up the ABV by an extra 3% from our existing Silver Cachaça so it stands out boldly in cocktails.
What about the packaging? How is the redesign functional for bartenders?
Here are some of the bottle’s key design features:
- The bottle measures 3.7” in diameter, leading to a smaller footprint in the bar well.
- The longer neck improves grip and wrist torque to balance extra weight.
- The small circumference and curvy shape of mid-level grip reduces hand strain.
Talk to us about mixing with Novo Fogo Bar Strength.
The flavor profile of our Bar Strength Silver Cachaça evokes our tropical origin in Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest, with notes of banana, lime blossoms, passion fruit, sweet red peppers, sea salt, and green grass. We think its versatility and deliciousness will meet the requirements of the most inventive bartenders. It also plays nicely with other bright, tropical flavors like citrus (the Caipirinha’s combination of cachaça, lime, sugar, and ice is sublime), berries, and seasonal fruits.
How is the higher-proof being received by bartenders? What is the feedback you’ve received?
We’ve received feedback that the seemingly modest 3% increase in ABV brings some much-appreciated heft to cocktails. It’s possible to use a touch less to achieve a similar drink, which also helps to reduce pour costs. In bars where margins are slim, every drop counts!
As a carbon negative company with a dedicated environmental focus and cutting-edge in cachaça—where do you see this category headed?
We’re trying to be leaders in the cachaça category by growing it responsibly. For us, that means farming organically and using production methods that aren’t detrimental to the environment, treating our community and employees really well, reducing and offsetting our entire business’s carbon emissions, and being hyper-focused on sourcing Brazilian wood barrels from legal and sustainable sources. In all these areas, cachaça has the potential to be an emissary of doing business positively Brazil, by producing delicious things while taking care of people and prioritizing environmental conservation. Just a fraction of Brazil’s cachaça production is exported from the country, so there is a lot of room for more people outside Brazil to discover and fall in love with it!
BERRY BRAZILIAN
Ingredients:
- 2 oz. Novo Fogo Bar Strength Silver Cachaça
- 3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
- 1/2 oz. Campari
- 1/2 oz. strawberry syrup*
Preparation: Shake all ingredients with ice and strain over fresh ice. Garnish with sliced strawberries. *Strawberry syrup: blend 1 cup of fresh or (frozen and thawed) strawberries into 1 cup of 1:1 simple syrup. Strain through a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth.
PARANÁ PUNCH
Ingredients:
- 1/2 oz. Novo Fogo Bar Strength Silver Cachaça
- 1 oz. organic lemon juice
- 1 oz. erva-mate tea syrup*
- 5 mint leaves
- 1 1/2 oz. sparkling wine
Preparation: Add all ingredients except for sparkling wine in a shaker and shake with ice. Pour over ice and top with sparkling wine, stirring to combine. Garnish with fresh mint.
This Brazilian sour brings together two delightful beverages from southern Brazil: Novo Fogo Organic Cachaça and erva-mate (aka yerba mate). Mate is a traditional South American tea made with the leaves of a forest shrub that are high in caffeine and antioxidants. The flavor of Brazilian erva-mate is like robust, earthy green tea. It can be enjoyed hot or cold; cold mate tea is commonly mixed with citrus or herbs and is called tereré.
*To make erva-mate tea syrup, bring 1 cup of water to a boil and turn off the heat. Dissolve 1 cup of sugar in the water. Steep 6 bags of bagged mate tea in the hot syrup for 15-20 minutes, then remove the tea bags and chill the syrup.
Bartenders—Want to enter your Environmentally Friendly Cocktail in the Novo Fogo Bar Strength Cachaça Contest? Enter HERE.
The post Bar Strength Cachaça Made for Bartenders appeared first on Chilled Magazine.
Source: Mixology News
