Rémy Cointreau’s passion-fruit idea, and a name with a tilde.

Passoã was created inside the French group Rémy Cointreau. English Wikipedia says the liqueur was invented in 1985, launched on the European market in 1986 and taken worldwide in 1994; Difford’s Guide also gives 1986 as the launch year. Its main ingredient is passion fruit, and English Wikipedia says the original version contained passion-fruit juice from Brazil.

The name was chosen to sound Brazilian. It uses the Portuguese letter ã, but English Wikipedia notes that “Passoã” is not a word in Portuguese; it cites the name as an example of foreign branding, a coined word that borrows the look of another language. The brand’s own spelling keeps the tilde, and this guide follows it.

For most of its life the liqueur was made in Anjou. French Wikipedia places production at Saint-Barthélemy-d’Anjou, on the edge of Angers, and gives Angers as its city of origin, the home of the group’s orange liqueur Cointreau. The Spirits Business reported in December 2020 that Passoã had been produced at Rémy Cointreau’s Angers site until then.

The brand’s path in France was its own. French Wikipedia, citing the trade press, says Passoã was launched commercially in France in 2000, with a radio campaign from June of that year, and that it was distributed there by Lixir. Strength has shifted too: Difford’s Guide says the liqueur was originally bottled at 20% alcohol by volume and has been 17% outside the United States since 2005, while the US version stayed at 20%; French Wikipedia says the French bottling was lowered again, to 15%, in 2012. English Wikipedia now gives a range of 14.9% to 20% depending on the country.

A matte black bottle and a bright liquid.

Passoã’s identity rests on contrast. English Wikipedia describes a red liquid sold in a black bottle, and French Wikipedia describes the 70cl bottle as wrapped in an opaque black sleeve. The dark glass hides the bright, orange-red drink until it is poured

The range has grown around the original. French Wikipedia lists flavoured versions with mango, pineapple and coconut, a Passoã Diablo combining passion fruit with cactus and ginger, and ready-to-drink cocktails.

A cocktail did much of the work in the 2010s. When Lucas Bols completed its purchase of the brand in December 2020, chief executive Huub van Doorne told The Spirits Business that Passoã “successfully drives the Porn Star Martini trend,” which he called the number-one cocktail in the UK. English Wikipedia describes the cocktail as passion-fruit liqueur with vanilla vodka and a glass of prosecco on the side, and The Spirits Business reported on a Passoã Pornstar Martini competition in 2024.

The packaging has been reworked twice under Bols. Just Drinks reported in February 2020 that Lucas Bols planned a global rebrand that would dial down Passoã’s Brazilian cues and aim the drink at the post-work, pre-evening occasion. Then, for the brand’s 40th anniversary, Bols redesigned the bottle: Drinks Intel reported on 29 May 2026 and The Spirits Business on 2 June 2026 that the matte black bottle gains a transparent window at its base showing the orange liquid, rolling out first in the United States from June 2026 with a new one-litre size for bars beside the 750ml bottle. Ignacio Llaneza, Lucas Bols’s vice-president of marketing for the US and Canada, said the bottle “reflects where cocktail culture is heading today.” The launch came with a digital-first campaign called Taste the Sunset, which The Drinks Business reported in February 2026 would also run globally in the on-trade.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are vodka, liqueur and gin names: Svedka, Wyborowa, Beluga, Haku, Fireball, Passoã and Whitley Neill. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a hotel bar.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled, blended and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a French group to a Dutch one.

Ownership moved in two steps. In December 2016 Rémy Cointreau and Lucas Bols set up Passoã SAS, a joint venture that brought the brand into the Dutch company’s portfolio, English Wikipedia and The Spirits Business report; Bols had the right to buy all of Rémy Cointreau’s shares in due time. It did so in December 2020, ending the joint venture. The Spirits Business reported that Rémy Cointreau described the sale as in line with its brand strategy, and that production was moving from Angers to Avandis in the Netherlands, with bottling there expected from January 2021.

The new owner is one of the oldest names in spirits. English Wikipedia says the Bols family opened their distillery, ’t Lootsje, in Amsterdam in 1575, and gives Amsterdam as the company’s headquarters. In October 2023 DutchNews reported that Lucas Bols had agreed to a takeover offer from Nolet, the Schiedam distiller behind Ketel One, which had built up the largest stake in the company. Through those changes Passoã has stayed a Lucas Bols brand; The Spirits Business described it as owned by Lucas Bols in June 2026.

The name needs a little care. Passoã is unrelated to Passiona, the Australian passion-fruit soft drink, and English Wikipedia points out that its own tilde-bearing name is a coinage rather than Portuguese.

For a design guide, Passoã shows how a single container decision — a black bottle around a bright drink — can stay constant through changes of owner, factory and strength, and how a redesign can open a small window in it rather than replace it. Compare Cointreau, the Angers liqueur from the group that created Passoã, and Malibu, another tropical liqueur built on a single bottle colour. For this guide we use bottle black, passion red and sunset orange with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Passoã’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.