genever —from the French baie de genièvre, meaning juniper berry—is a botanical grain spirit containing juniper. It is spelled jenever (yuh-NAY-vur) in the modern-day Dutch language and is the national drink of both the Netherlands and Belgium, both of which possess distinct and legitimate genever-making traditions, and which collectively consume the largest share of the world genever market.
The back of a promotional playing card for Hertekamp Oude Genever, ca. 1960, showing the traditional broad-shouldered, square case bottle.
Wondrich Collection.
Origins
The origins of genever lie in the spirit-based medicines that were created with the awakening, or reawakening, of European distilling in the twelfth century. See distillation, history. At first, the spirit used was grape-based, whether wine was produced in the distiller’s region or not. Belgian priest and academic Thomas van Cantimpré’s Liber de Natura Rerum encyclopedia (completed in 1245) mentions juniper berries being cooked in rainwater or in wine as a stomach medicine; van Cantimpré’s countryman Jacob van Maerlant translated this book into middle Dutch, expanded it, and published it as Der Naturen Bloeme in 1269, the oldest known printed mention of distilling in the Netherlands. Van Maerlant mentioned juniper constantly—juniper was clearly a benchmark medicine at the time, an aid to digestion, aches, and pains, as well as a flavoring and preservative.
History
A plague epidemic in the Netherlands that began in 1349 led to widespread medicinal use of both juniper (as disinfectant; plague doctors packed their “bird nose” masks with it) and distilled medicinal alcohol; a 1351 text by the Belgian Johannes van Aalter describes making wine-based aqua vitae, a medicinal distillate. See health and spirits.
In 1495, an unknown but clearly wealthy individual in the Arnhem/Apeldoorn region of the Netherlands self-published a lavish single edition of a cookbook featuring a recipe titled “Gebrande Wyn Te Maken” (Making burned wine), which is now part of the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library. This recipe, in among the food recipes, has a very similar method to distilling French wine to van Aalter’s but features in addition, as botanicals, a huge array of what were at the time the most fantastically expensive spices in the world: nutmeg, cloves, galangal, ginger, grains of paradise, and cinnamon, to name but a few. In fact, juniper is one of the least expensive ingredients. This 1495 recipe is seen as the very first mention of a recreational juniper spirit, but since by 1497 distilled alcohol was being taxed in Amsterdam, we must assume that drinking distilled spirits for fun started earlier than 1495 but later than 1350 or so. Initially, French wine as a base was recommended for medicinal distillates and for higher quality in general, but by 1588, as the German/Dutch Casper Janszoon Coolhaes wrote in his influential distilling manual Van seeckere seer costelijcke wateren, grain had replaced grapes as the base for making recreational alcohol. See Coolhaes, Caspar Janszoon. Genever became the national drink of the Netherlands and was a mainstay during the Golden Age of Dutch wealth and influence in the 1600s, accompanying their navy and the ships of the Dutch East India Company as they attained dominance of the seas and trade.
When England gained a Dutch king, Willem of Orange in 1688, trade links between the Netherlands and England—already very strong—led to huge demand for genever in England. Based on cheap, high-quality barley and rye secured through the Netherlands’s excellent trading relationship with the northern European Hanseatic League and made by the most experienced distillers in Europe, Dutch genever was a rich spirit tasting mostly of the grain from which it was made. English distillers, trying to copy it, lacked the raw materials and often the skill to do so; instead, they rectified their grain spirit by redistillation and other means and made up the missing flavor by adding vastly more botanicals and sugar, creating a stripped-down version of genever to which they gave a stripped-down name: gin. See gin.
Distilling back in the Netherlands had become such big business that it posed hygiene and safety issues, and cities ruled that distillation be moved to satellite towns such as Weesp (the satellite of Amsterdam) and Schiedam (the satellite of Rotterdam). Schiedam grew to have almost four hundred distilleries of one sort or another by the late 1800s, each of them privately owned but utilizing standardized mash bills, fermenters, and stills to make a product— The United States was a major market. Genever reigned supreme there during the first golden age of cocktails of the mid-1800s, making up by far the bulk of imported gin. It was hit hard in the late 1800s by the rise of lighter, drier drinks such as the Dry Martini (dry vermouth and genever do not mix well), followed rapidly by a world war, Prohibition, and another war. Post-1945, Dutch distillers began experimenting with using less moutwijn, leading to the birth of the wildly successful (not to mention profitable) jonge style, which came to dominate the market domestically and virtually killed off the oude style. Vicious price wars in the 1970s coupled with changing tastes led to a huge decline in genever sales in Belgium and the Netherlands, and the category as a whole still suffers major reductions in sales year-on-year in those countries. Happily, the resurgence in popularity of classic cocktails since the 1990s has ensured that oude-style genever is once more on the radar of serious mixologists. Its signature classic cocktails can be said to be the Improved Holland Gin Cock-Tail, the Collins, and the Martinez. See Collins and Martinez. The heart of all genever is moutwijn (malt wine), a grain distillate distilled at least three times. Made from what is usually a multigrain mash fermented from rye, corn, and malted barley, the first distillate from a short stripping column is called ruwnat, the second (from a pot still) enkelnat, and the third (also pot still) bestnat, or moutwijn; moutwijn must be between 46 percent and 48 percent alcohol by volume. See triple distillation (full and partial). Optionally, this moutwijn can then be distilled a fourth time to make what is known as korenwijn (literally, “grainwine,” but not to be confused with korenwijn/korenwyn/corenwyn). Formerly, the moutwijn, usually purchased from brokers, was redistilled with botanicals to make genever; now, it is more commonly blended with neutral spirits that have been distilled with botanicals including juniper berries or juniper aroma. These neutral spirits may be from sugar beets or (for better quality brands) grain. Jonge (young) style genever must contain a minimum of 1.5 percent and a maximum of 15 percent moutwijn (most stay close to the minimum), be at least 35 percent ABV, contain no more than 10 grams of sugar per liter, and be made in the Netherlands or Belgium. Jonge is by far the best-selling style of genever—currently 25 percent of the total Dutch liquor market is genever, 98 percent of which is jonge. Oude (old) style genever must contain a minimum of 15 percent moutwijn (most contain about 17 percent), be a minimum of 35 percent ABV, contain no more than 20 g sugar per liter, and be made in the Netherlands or Belgium. Oude is what most people outside the Netherlands and Belgium expect genever to be. Korenwijn/korenwyn/corenwyn is a Netherlands- only luxury oude-style genever that must contain a minimum of 51 percent moutwijn (most brands contain about 53 percent), be a minimum of 38 percent ABV, and contain no more than 20 g sugar per liter. There is no requirement to age any genever regardless of the name, but if aging is mentioned on the label, it must be for a minimum of one year in barrels no larger than a seven-hundred-liter capacity. Genever may legally be made anywhere in the Netherlands, Belgium, the Nordrhein-Westfalen and Niedersachsen regions of Germany, and the Nord and Pas de Calais regions of France. Other styles of genever not legally regulated by the above categories include 100 percent malt-wine genever (regulated by the voluntary Seal of Schiedam), fruit genevers (which typically don’t contain moutwijn), and cream genevers (ditto). Jansen, Herman. In Minutes of Evidence Taken by the Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits, vol. 2. London: HMSO, 55–57. European Union Regulation 2019/787 on the Definition, Description, Presentation and Labelling of Spirit Drinks. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32019R0787 (accessed July 30, 2021). Netherlands Spirits Producers Association. “Regulations on Naming Distilled- and Weak-Distilled Spirits, 2009, Netherlands (lapsed).” https://www.spiritsnl.nl (accessed February 9, 2021). By: Philip DuffProduction
The back of a promotional playing card for Hertekamp Oude Genever, ca. 1960, showing the traditional broad-shouldered, square case bottle. Source: Wondrich Collection.