Boozehound - Jason Wilson [28]
After dinner, T. got very sad about missing her boyfriend back in Denmark and for a brief moment threatened to jump into the canal. Then, as if on cue, our attention was diverted by some kid who staggered out of a coffeehouse and fell over flat, knocking down an entire line of bicycles, like dominos. Laughing now, T. decided not to jump in the canal, and we found a new bar for another genever.
Yes, this is what genever tasted like to me. Not just “earthy and funky.” Not something I could encapsulate into a few tasting notes capped by a three-star versus four-star rating. It was something untranslatable. Genever tasted exactly like that day in Amsterdam, and everything surrounding that day. Genever tasted like seediness and nostalgia itself. I was smiling to myself about all this when I suddenly snapped back to the present in the hotel lobby. Duff looked slightly concerned that I might drink his entire flask. I recapped it and handed it back.
Duff told me that Bols was actively working behind the scenes to bring genever back into the United States. “It’s all very Secret Squirrel at the moment,” he said. “But you could always come visit us again in Amsterdam.”
In fact, a few months later I did return to Amsterdam. Things had started to change a little since my last visit. The eradication of seediness had begun. There had been a crackdown on coffeehouses that sell cannabis. The government had closed a large number of the brothels in the Red Light District.
At the same time, Lucas Bols was well on its way to reintroducing genever—with an American-friendly recipe—to the U.S. market in 2008. On the first day of my visit, I went to the House of Bols for a genever sampling. Genever can only be made in the Netherlands (a designation of origin from the European Union was awarded in 2007). While it’s technically true to call it “the original gin,” in reality genever often has more similarities to whiskey in taste and application than to contemporary gins. The reason is that genever must always consist of a small percentage of malt wine, which is a distillate of three kinds of grain: corn, rye, and wheat. There are three basic genevers: oude, jonge, and corenwyn. Genever labeled oude, or old, is not necessarily aged, but rather is made according to the traditional, old recipe from the sixteenth century calling for at least 15 percent malt wine. Jonge, or young, genever is the most popular spirit in the Netherlands, and it follows a younger recipe dating from the early twentieth century, with less malt wine. A more neutral spirit, it still maintains some of the flavorful maltiness of the oude. Corenwyn, literally corn wine, is a cask-aged genever that must contain at least 51 percent malt wine. The spirit’s best expression, corenwyn shares many of the characteristics of fine aged whiskey.
After the tasting, I wandered throughout the House of Bols’s touristic, high-tech multimedia museum. I stepped into a 280-degree projection room that—at least as Bols described it—“makes it possible for the visitor to step literally into the world of night life.” It was a very loud world, filled with pumping house music. Along one rainbow wall was a sensory exercise to practice my smelling: thirty-six puffers, each of which had a different mystery scent—from peach to mint to strawberry to coffee—which I was supposed to puff into my face and try to guess. One big surprise was the emphasis Bols seems to place on what’s officially called “flair bartending,” or what most people would describe as “bartending like Tom Cruise did it in Cocktail.” Bols apparently takes the whole flair bartending thing very seriously and reengineered its liqueur bottles specifically for optimal flair bartending, developing “a bottle that is scientifically proven to offer significant cocktail making performance improvements of up to 33 percent,” according to one exhibit. They sell practice flair bottles, made of rubber,