This Brazilian Brewer Is Making Beer Out of $20,000 Bonsai Trees
The craft beer market has grown so rapidly in recent years that breweries are getting increasingly creative in order to set their products apart from the rest.
In the case of Heroica, located in the Brazilian city of Jundiaí (about an hour from São Paulo), the small gypsy brewery relies upon a bonsai master to provide some of the exquisite ingredients they use in their brewing processes.
Heroica’s beers not only combine hops, barley, and yeast; they also use branches of centennial Japanese bonsai trees. For some recipes, the pruned branches come from trees that can cost more than $20,000 US.
The idea came from Renato Bocabello, one of the biggest bonsai masters in Brazil. His brother-in-law, Lucas Domingues, began making his own beers when Bocabello gave him a homebrewing kit as a gift. With his new equipment, Domingues started to test his own recipes.
“I was already working in a commercial brewery, following predetermined recipes without the possibility of adding a personal touch or making any kind of change,” Domingues says. “I decided to make very experimental tests at home and I came up with very different results.”
His early experiments included a farmhouse ale made with pepper, lemon, and coca leaves—the South American plant known for its psychoactive alkaloids. The idea for using bonsai branches came to him after he tasted a cachaça infused with branches of kuromatsu (Japanese black pine).
“I noticed some similarity to many resinous hop flavors, noticeably perceived in some IPAs, and we wondered how a beer made with the bonsai pine branches would taste. So we came up with our Kuromatsu Kamikaze IPA,” he says. According to Domingues, Scandinavian people have historically used pine instead of hops to make beer in order to balance flavor. “Everyone who tasted the beer loved it, so my partner, beer sommelier Fábio Walsh, and I established a commercial brewery,” he adds.
Bocabello usually prunes his more than 400 bonsai trees (a hundred of which are kuromatsu) twice a year, so he ends up with many pounds of these precious leftovers that can be used in the IPA recipe. His kuromatsu trees were a gift from a third-generation member of a Japanese family that came to Brazil in 1912 aboard of the Itsukushima-maru, the second ship with immigrants from Japan to dock in the country, which is now home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.
Read more at source: MUNCHIES
