A brand built in New York, made in Brazil.

Avuá is a cachaça brand founded in the United States and made in Brazil. Its founders were two New Yorkers, Nate Whitehouse and Pete Nevenglosky. Matt Pietrek’s spirits site Cocktail Wonk, writing in November 2015, described Nevenglosky as a former brand manager at Red Bull and Whitehouse as a lawyer and entrepreneur; the rum-review site The Lone Caner gave the same backgrounds in 2018, and said the pair had sensed a rising American interest in craft spirits.

Sources give two dates. Cocktail Wonk said Avuá was launched in 2013, and the company says it launched the brand in 2013 at Milk & Honey, the New York cocktail bar. A July 2016 item in the German trade publication About-Drinks, drawn from the company’s own material, said the New York business behind Avuá was founded in 2011 by Whitehouse, Nevenglosky and a third partner, Mark Christou.

The brand’s website is published under the name Avua Corp, and its newsletter promises news of both Avuá Cachaça and Drifter Spirits, a related drinks business. The site lists distributors in states from New York and California to Texas and Florida, and names retailers in each. Its American address is avuacachaca.com; a Brazilian address, avuacachaca.com.br, has also appeared in its publicity.

Fazenda da Quinta, 1923.

Avuá does not run its own distillery. It is made at Fazenda da Quinta, named by Cocktail Wonk as Fazenda da Quinta Agronegócios, in the municipality of Carmo, in Rio de Janeiro state. Cocktail Wonk put the farm about four hours north-east of the city of Rio and dated the distillery to 1923; The Lone Caner also gave 1923, and noted that the farm sells cachaças under its own da Quinta name; Cocktail Wonk said the distillery makes three main cachaças for the Brazilian market. About-Drinks named the distiller as Katia Espírito Santo, and said Avuá was made on the farm from cane-growing through distillation and ageing to bottling.

The company describes the process in detail. According to Avuá’s literature, as reported by Cocktail Wonk, all the cane is grown on the farm, three types of cane are milled using a waterwheel, the juice ferments with wild yeast for less than a day, and the cachaça is pot-distilled once. The brand’s website says the cane is grown without pesticides and harvested by hand, and that its cachaça is distilled in copper pot stills.

The range is built on wood. Avuá Prata, the company says, is rested in stainless-steel vats before being bottled by hand; Still Strength is the same spirit at 90 proof; and Avuá Oak is aged for up to two years in French oak casks that previously held white wine. Other bottlings are named after Brazilian woods, among them Amburana and Jequitibá Rosa. The company’s website devotes a page to the native woods used to age cachaça, describing how each affects colour, aroma and flavour — amburana, it says, gives an intense colour, while white jequitibá is suited to storage barrels because it adds almost nothing — and another to sustainability, where it says it works to ensure replanting and sustainable sourcing of those woods. It has also added a falernum liqueur made from its cachaça.

The brand’s language borrows from Brazilian life. Its website promotes the tabelinha — a football term for a quick one-two pass, which it uses for the habit of alternating sips of neat cachaça and beer — and suggests a beer to pair with each of its cachaças. Publicity has leaned on Brazil’s big sporting moments too: About-Drinks reported in 2016 that, around the Olympic Games in Rio, Avuá was bringing together bartenders from around the world in national teams to create cocktails with its cachaça.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all cachaça names: Sagatiba, Avuá, Germana, Yaguara, Pitú, Velho Barreiro and Weber Haus. Cachaça, Brazil’s sugar-cane spirit, is made by producers of very different kinds, from family stills that still carry a founder’s or a family’s name to brands that have been launched, bought or sold by much larger drinks companies, and a single label can be sold everywhere from a corner bar to an export market.

A cachaça brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit in the glass than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, changed its name or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its cachaça is actually distilled, aged 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 cachaça is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A bottle drawn from Niemeyer’s Rio.

The bottle is the brand’s clearest piece of design. Cocktail Wonk reported in 2015 that the bottle, and the brand itself, are inspired by the Rio de Janeiro of the 1950s, and in particular by the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect of Brasília. It described a base of swooping, ribbed glass, carrying a raised outline of “1923” — the distillery’s founding date — and a sabiá, the thrush that Cocktail Wonk called Brazil’s national bird.

The top of the bottle, the same article said, is a narrow cone wrapped in an asymmetric, angled label, and the cork repeats the cone shape.

That bottle carries a story the company tells consistently: a farm with a 1923 date, cane grown on the estate and woods from Brazilian forests. Its website quotes the drinks writer David Wondrich, writing in Esquire, on Fazenda da Quinta as an artisanal producer “deep in the backcountry” of Rio de Janeiro state.

For a design guide, Avuá shows how a young brand can borrow a nation’s architecture to give a traditional spirit a modern shape. Compare Novo Fogo, an organic cachaça from Paraná launched in 2010, and Leblon, another cachaça brand whose business was based in New York. For this guide we use a Sabiá orange, an amber and a concrete grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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