Review: Novo Fogo Tanager Cachaca
N
ovo Fogo Tanager is one of three varieties of cachaça in Novo Fogo’s Two-Wood Series. The other two are Novo Fogo Graciosa, and Novo Fogo Colibri. Wood is very important in the production of cachaça and the Atlantic Forest has lost 88% of its original size of 375 million acres due to deforestation. Novo Fogo has a reforestation project aimed at reversing the journey towards extinction of several threatened native Brazilian tree species. Tanager was the first two-wood cachaça broadly available in the USA. Novo Fogo crafts their cachaça at a distillery in the heart of Brazil’s coastal rainforest, Floresta Atlantica from organic sugar cane hand cut with a machete and pressed within hours. Like Novo Fogo Chameleon it is aged for one year in repurposed oak barrels. Tanager is finished in casks of Arariba, (Brazilian Zebrawood), non chill filtered, and bottled at 84 proof. Read more 
Review: Novo Fogo Silver Cachaca
Novo Fogo Silver Cachaca is one of the worlds most earth friendly spirits, and as such they are the ideal spirit to review today on Earth Day. Cachaca, or Brazilian rum as it is also known, is made from sugar cane similar to rhum Agricole, and not the molasses used to produce most Caribbean rum. Novo Fogo is crafted from organic sugar cane at a zero waste distillery built into the slope of a hill so the liquids can flow from room to room by gravity instead of motorized pumps. The sugar cane is hand cut with machetes and immediately transported to the distillery. The cane is pressed within hours. The juice contains about 15% sugar. The dried up sugar cane pulp is used as fuel to fire stills and also as a natural compost to fertilize the fields. Once the sugarcane juice has been filtered, wild yeast cultivated from their own cane is added to a steel tank and fermented for 24 hours, producing a wine. The sugarcane wine is distilled in a copper pot still. Only the heart of the spirit is captured, yielding 130 liters of cachaça. The cachaca rests in stainless steel tanks for 1 year to smoothen without changing its flavor. Novo Fogo is not chill filtered, and filled in recycled glass bottles. Read more