This is not a fairy tale, but thanks to its epic, almost unbelievable story, it could be one. About how the guys from the Landcraft craft distillery do their job more than well, we all could be convinced last year when our joint .pepper..gin just flew off the shelves. This year, our friendship decided not only to spice it up but to add the intoxicating scent of chocolate and Sicilian oranges. Let Ondra from Landcraft speak, who beautifully wrote down our shared story, the journey that ended with the creation of a new category of circular distillates: nøGin. Or did it just begin?
“We found Mr. Olšák...
... he imported organic products from Sicily, ran a gym in Mělník, and probably had orange juice vending machines everywhere. I explained to him what we were about, and he kept frowning: look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I just don’t want to sell you oranges just so you can peel the skins off them. This has to be solved somehow. Let me think it over. The next day he called us again: You know what? I’ve got it. Every Friday and Saturday I make fresh juice at the Holešovice market hall. I throw the peels into bags and then the bags into the trash. When you want them, you can always pick them up on Saturday after noon. And that was it. Although it meant going to the market hall every Saturday, it was manageable on a rotating basis,” and so the peel of Sicilian oranges entered this story first, the only one Landcraft has been using in their distillates since 2019.
“Michal Herůfek shows us his family chocolate factory, a producer of chocolate pralines, a melangeur, and many other wonders. Then we move on to the process of purchasing cocoa beans, their fermentation, and roasting. Here is the roaster. Here the skins are peeled off those beans. We put those into these bags. Wait! Waste? Circular eyes will enlighten us. Michal, would you give us these bags? In the following weeks, we try extracting and distilling cocoa skins. We use Petr’s education in organic chemistry, vacuum, fat separators, and other tricks so that cocoa butter, which the skins are full of, does not get into the final product. In the end, we succeed, and the result is a distillate that smells like freshly poured hot chocolate.” You already know chocolate from the Herufeks well from us in connection with our Kampot pepper. We could imagine this combination also in alcohol, so we said: why not.
What is negin?
"When Klára and David then come up with the question of whether we are ready for the next .pepper..gin. edition, we try to persuade them that it doesn't have to be gin. Look, today anyone can make gin. Let's try negin. What is negin? Simply something like gin, only you don't put juniper in it," What? Is that possible?
The guys explained to us that yes, it is. That gin is a category of juniper-based distillates, whose taste everyone can imagine. However, there are huge differences among individual gins: in some, there may be so little juniper that it is practically unnoticeable. Their core is formed by other herbs and additives. But the name gin is so significant that they don't omit it.
Our nørGin shows that it doesn't need a category, but it doesn't hide its origin. It is characterized by distillation in ultra-fine alcohol, where all three essences – green Kampot pepper, chocolate, and orange – were extracted separately beforehand. We found out that juniper is not needed at all for this distillate to be complex in taste and aroma.
A normal label would be quite boring, we said. So we finished this rebellious work at the Butterflies&Hurricanes art house, where the artists designed the right, distinctive... A label? Not at all. These are fragments of our story. There are 19 of them in total, and only you can choose what form your nørGin will take. They represent the basic values of all of us who stand behind nørGin: circularity, ecology, sustainability, love for the planet, for our work, and for the people around us.
And the recommendation from the guys at Landcraft?
"Alone? Divine. With tonic? Brilliant." And we just add that the absolutely brilliant tonic is precisely their To_Nic, or the grapefruit soda from Imperial. :-)
