From potato schnapps to cane spirit on a Serra Gaúcha hillside.

Weber Haus is a cachaça made by the Weber family in Ivoti, a town in the Serra Gaúcha hills of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. The family’s story, as the company tells it, begins with emigration rather than distilling. Its catalogue says the Webers left the Hunsrück region of Germany in 1824 and settled in the forested slopes of what is now Ivoti, on a small parcel known as Lote 48; InfoMoney, in a July 2024 profile, gave the family’s arrival in Brazil as 25 July 1824. The plot number has since become the name of some of the brand’s rarest bottlings.

The first spirit the family made in Brazil was not cachaça. The company says the settlers brought with them a habit of distilling schnapps from potatoes, as they had done at home, and only began planting sugar cane later, adapting their methods to the local crop. Its catalogue dates the first cachaça to 1848. For roughly a century after that, InfoMoney reported, the family farmed its small holding and used its cane spirit almost as currency, trading it for tools and food; Evandro Weber, the present director, told the paper that his grandfather long delivered cachaça by horse-drawn cart.

The business as a registered company dates from 1948. The company’s own history page says it was “founded in 1948 at Lote 48,” and InfoMoney wrote that a company registration was opened that year so that the family could bottle and sell its cachaça. The trading name that appears on the cover of the company’s catalogue is H. Weber. Its first commercial brand, the catalogue says, was Caninha Primavera — “caninha” being a common Brazilian diminutive for cane spirit.

A lost name, a German one in its place, and an organic certificate.

The name on the bottle changed at the turn of the century. Salvador’s Correio, in a profile of Evandro Weber published in August 2026, reported that in the late 1990s the family discovered that “Primavera,” the name it had used for years, had never been registered, and that, without the means for a long legal fight, it gave the name up. InfoMoney put it slightly differently in 2024: the name was already registered by another party in the interior of São Paulo state. Both agree on the outcome. The company’s catalogue says the Weber Haus brand “came into operation” in 2001, and Correio says the business was renamed Weber Haus that year. The new name pairs the family surname with the German word for “house.” Evandro Weber told Correio that the episode, painful at the time, also pushed the family to look for new paths.

The years that followed were about reach and certification. The catalogue says that from 2004 the company began selling beyond its regional market of Ivoti, Dois Irmãos and Novo Hamburgo, and that it made its first export in 2006; InfoMoney dated the start of international sales to 2007. According to InfoMoney, the distillery received organic certification in 2005, and it holds a traceability certification, covering the chain from soil preparation to bottle, developed with the small-business agency Sebrae and the national standards body Inmetro. Today the company describes its production as “100% orgânica.” When the Bares SP trade site covered the launch of its first vodka in February 2024, it noted that the label carried organic and traceability seals.

The spirit itself is distilled in copper alembic stills, the company says, and keeps only the “heart” of each run. Much of the range is then aged in wood, and the woods are a large part of how Weber Haus presents itself. Its catalogue lists French and American oak alongside Brazilian timbers — bálsamo, amburana, canela sassafrás, grápia and cabriúva — and gives ageing times from one year to twenty-one. The organic white cachaça (prata) and single-wood amburana and bálsamo expressions sit at one end of the range; at the other are limited editions that use the family history as their label copy.

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.

Anniversary bottles, a diamond-shaped decanter and a new distillery.

Weber Haus uses its own chronology as packaging. A special reserve distilled in 1998 was named Lote 48, the catalogue says, to mark the distillery’s 55th anniversary; the current Lote 48 extra premium is a twelve-year blend aged in bálsamo and French oak and released in an edition of 2,000 bottles. In 2024 the family released an Extra Premium 200 Anos Imigração, aged in amburana and European oak, which its catalogue presents as a tribute to the Germans who made Brazil their home 200 years earlier; InfoMoney described it that July. Another extra premium is finished in sherry casks imported from Spain.

The most elaborate of these is Weber Haus Diamant 21 Anos. According to the catalogue, Hugo Weber and his son Evandro set aside cachaça distilled in the 1999 harvest to rest in their best casks in 2000, with no name or purpose fixed for it. ISTOÉ Dinheiro reported in November 2021 that the result, aged six years in French oak and fifteen in bálsamo, was released as a limited edition of 1,000 bottles in a diamond-shaped bottle presented in a mirrored wooden case, with a version that has a real diamond set into the glass; bottle number 0001 was sold at auction in Ivoti.

Weber Haus remains a family company. Correio named Evandro Weber’s parents as Hugo and Eugênia Weber and described the business as being in its fifth generation; InfoMoney identified Evandro as partner and director. Under him the range has widened beyond cachaça to gin, rum, liqueurs, mixed drinks and, since 2024, an organic vodka, Antiqua Silver. The distillery in Ivoti is open to visitors, and in 2024 InfoMoney reported plans for a new factory beside the existing one, with operations expected from late 2026 or early 2027; Correio said in 2026 that the new distillery would be built in Ivoti along Industry 4.0 lines. The company is unrelated to Weber, the American barbecue-grill maker.

For a design guide, Weber Haus shows how a family can turn a plot number, a German surname and the woods of its own region into a label language, after a lost trademark forced it to start again with a new name. Compare Novo Fogo, the organic cachaça from Morretes in Paraná, and Ypióca, the Ceará cachaça of 1846. For this guide we use a copper, a cane green and a limewash white with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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