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Europe > Netherlands > Amsterdam > Amsterdam > Articles > Drinking in Amsterdam

Drinking in Amsterdam

by Jasper Winn

Those poor old Amsterdamers have had alcohol forced on them. If it weren’t for their laudable interest in hygiene the Dutch would all be sober, teetotal H²O tipplers. Or so they claim.

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Those poor old Amsterdamers have had alcohol forced on them. If it weren’t for their laudable interest in hygiene the Dutch would all be sober, teetotal H²O tipplers. Or so they claim. But a few centuries back (and when I last looked as well) the city’s canals and rivers were so filthy that drinking water had to be shipped in and sold from ‘water barges.’ It was allegedly cheaper to drink beer - though if ale is made from water and clean water costs x per liter it’s hard to see how beer could have cost less than x, unless the Golden Age brewers were just running a hose from the nearest canal to the barrels and making the resulting interesting brown colour its USP.

Whatever, the Dutch held the high ground in early Europe when it came to assumptions of heavy drinking prowess - ‘Dutch courage’ was self explanatory (and provided exactly the kind of alcohol fuelled disregard for self-preservation needed for the ‘sport’ of dike vaulting), ‘Dutch gleek’ was drinking as a sport, and ‘taking a Dutchman’s draught’ was the awed homage paid by other nations’ drinkers to Netherlanders ‘’sipping’ at their pints or, more accurately, at their fluitje or vaas as local beer glasses are dubbed according to size.

A number of other unique Dutch drinking traditions also use hygiene as an excuse. Take the ‘two fingers’ of head on every glass of beer pushed at you across a modern bar counter. Comment on this to the barman and as he turns away in disdain you’ll be able to lip-read some sentence containing, at the very least, the words idioot and buitenlander. Or, if the barman is matier, you’ll get an explanation about a fine-upstanding ‘crown’ being a litmus test for foam-busting contaminants like grease, lipstick, soap or leprechauns’ piss. A good crest means the glass, and the beer, is clean. The head also draws off gases leaving room inside you for even more beer. Sound commercial reasoning, if nothing else.

Holland’s national drink is jenever, or gin as it’s known to the foreign distillers who could see a good idea when they borrowed one. Short of distilling bathtub vodka, jenever was about the most efficient way of making strong spirits out of the minimum of the cheapest ingredients (so, no surprise there, then). But a good jenever actually tastes wonderful, especially as the Dutch soon threw economic caution to the winds and came up with ever-finer varieties. Today it’s still sold in three grades: jong, oud and zeer oud - so ‘very old’ that it has to use a Zimmer frame to get as far as the bottle. In the past distillers and their distributors established tasting houses - proeflokalen - where you could drop by for a free shot so you could judge standards before buying a demijohn or two of carryout. You pay for your jenever nowadays, though you are still expected to stand whilst you knock it back, but a proeflokalen - it translates as a ‘testing room’ - is well worth a visit. Het Wynand Fockink (Pijlsteeg 31) is about the cheeriest and the most authentic, especially when local street musicians drop in for a bit of practice. And it gives you the chance to end long meetings by muttering "Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going for a Fockink drink."

One of my favourite bars is in the Hotel Filosoof (Anna van den Vondelstraat 11). The hotel’s rooms are decorated according to different schools of philosophical thinkery - the Socrates, the Zen, the Marx, the nihilist (okay, I made the last one up, but you get the idea.) Proprietor Ida Jongsma is a practicing philosopher and often holds court over free ranging discussions in the gezellig little bar, though drink represents the true veritas here. And just down down the road adjoining the Vondelpark is the Hollandse Manege, another of the city’s best kept drinking secrets. It’s a riding school with 19th century classical riding hall, the smell of horse sweat and lasses in jodhpurs, but upstairs is a huge mirrored drinking hall. And you don’t have to talk about nags, though everybody else does.

Amsterdam’s ‘brown cafes’ are tobacco hued institutions generally fulfilling their role as ‘the local,’ with some of them having performed this important social function for three hundred years and more. Rembrandtesque characters and cutting edge artists mix together and all are liable to degenerate into song after a few drinks. Locals heading to the more popular bruin cafes do tend to avoid Friday and Saturday nights when they fill with blow-ins. The Katte in ‘t Wijngaert (Lindengracht 160) has pretty much everything you want in a brown café, and the forebears of many of today’s drinkers are the Jordaaniers who rioted when a nearby 1886 eel-tug-o-war was stopped and led to three days of rioting. And, you can’t get much more authentic local pride than that.

To re-drink Dutch maritime history head to In ‘t Aepjen (Zeedijk 1) founded in a 15th century seaman’s’ hostel, even if it’s argued by some that it’s not a true brown café. Nowadays, as then I suppose, weekend entertainment is provided by a shanty-ing accordionist. The name, ‘in the monkeys,’ refers to a credit system where by jolly tars would put up their pet simians as credit. The hostel was at one time, sailors being what they are, very rich in monkeys. Though you don’t often hear, "Golden marmoset? That’ll do nicely," nowadays - in fact they don’t even take credit cards - it’s worth paying cash for a kopstoot - a ‘knock on the head,’ beer with gin chaser. For hygiene’s sake.