From a small organic still on the Paraná coast to a brand of its own.

Novo Fogo — the name means “new fire” in Portuguese, the rum reviewer The Lone Caner noted in 2021 — is a brand of organic cachaça, Brazil’s spirit distilled from fresh sugarcane juice. Its liquid comes from Morretes, a small town on the coast of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. The company says its distillery and organic sugarcane farm sit in the Serra do Mar (“Mountains of the Sea”) at the edge of the protected Atlantic Forest, the Mata Atlântica.

The distillery is older than the brand. The Lone Caner reported in September 2021 that the producer began as a small distillery in Morretes founded in 2004 by Fulgencio Torres Viruel, with the master distiller Agenor Maccari, known as “Dr. Cachaça.” The Novo Fogo brand was launched in 2010, the same review said, after the entrepreneurs Dragos and Emily Axinte partnered with them to produce it, and in 2015 the four acquired the facilities of the distillery company, then a USDA-certified organic operation.

Dragos Axinte leads the business as founder and CEO. Kane’s Beverage News Daily quoted him as CEO in April 2019, when Skurnik Wine & Spirits took over distribution in New York and New Jersey from Winebow Group’s Martin Scott Wines, and The Daily Pour quoted him as founder and CEO in July 2023. The company describes itself as a team with homes on two continents: production in Brazil, and a headquarters team in Seattle, Washington, with brand ambassadors across the United States.

A forest, a farm and a duo from the dance floor.

Novo Fogo’s identity leans on place more than on heritage. The company calls its Morretes distillery zero-waste and its spirits carbon-negative, and it ties the brand to a tree-planting programme it calls The Un-Endangered Forest, which it says plants native and threatened trees in the Atlantic Forest. Those are the company’s own descriptions; the brand’s published materials present them alongside the organic certification as the core of what the bottle stands for.

The range is built around cachaça for the cocktail bar. A bartender competition run with Chilled magazine listed the Silver, Barrel-Aged, Chameleon and Tanager expressions alongside a higher-strength Bar Strength silver. The Daily Pour reported in July 2023 that the Silver Cachaça is made from fermented sugarcane juice that is pot distilled in small batches, and that it is the base of the company’s canned cocktails, which had just been reformulated as certified organic in lime, passion fruit and mango flavours. The same report said the new cans were designed to evoke the brand’s origins in the Brazilian rainforest. The Lone Caner quoted the company in 2021 as saying Chameleon was named for a cachaça versatile enough to “blend in” to many cocktails.

The most visible change came in 2022, when the Grammy-nominated dance-music duo SOFI TUKKER became co-owners and global brand ambassadors, as The Daily Pour reported in 2023. In August 2023 the brand released a passion-fruit cachaça named Drinkee, after one of the duo’s songs; The Daily Pour reported that it was developed by the distillery team in Morretes with the duo and bottled at 40% ABV. BevNET reported in 2024 that the partnership had extended to non-alcoholic sparkling mate teas, and the company’s site now lists three lines: organic cachaças, ready-to-drink cocktails and the mate teas.

The company also describes a sense of place in the glass. In the material it published for the Chilled competition, Novo Fogo said its cachaças reflect a coastal rainforest terroir, with flavours it lists as banana, lime blossom, coffee and sea salt, and it called itself a company that distils fresh sugarcane juice using methods that put environmental and human sustainability first.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all pisco, cachaça and anise-spirit names: Pisco Capel, Pisco Portón, BarSol, Leblon, Novo Fogo, Yeni Rakı and Ksarak. Spirit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses and cooperatives that still carry a founder’s or a place’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 cocktail bar.

A spirit 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 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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An independent cachaça with a distillery of its own.

Ownership has stayed close to the founders. The 2015 purchase put the distillery, and with it production, under the same people who built the brand, and the 2022 deal added SOFI TUKKER as co-owners rather than selling the business to a drinks group. As for where it is made, the company places both its distillery and its organic cane fields in Morretes, and The Daily Pour reported in 2023 that new products were developed by the distillery team there.

That makes Novo Fogo a useful contrast with the older names of the category. Ypióca, the Ceará cachaça dating from 1846, is a long-established Brazilian house, while Novo Fogo, launched in 2010, runs its headquarters team from Seattle and has courted bartenders with competitions such as its Brazilian Cocktail Challenge with Chilled magazine. The site’s typography note on the Novo Fogo font reads the wordmark as custom, clean lettering rather than a downloadable typeface.

For a design guide, Novo Fogo shows how a young spirits brand can carry its identity through place, certification and partnership rather than age — compare Ypióca and Leblon. For this guide we use Atlantic Forest green, sugarcane gold and cane-juice white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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