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 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.

"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."

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.

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.