De Kuyper , a Dutch liqueur and genever producer run continuously by the same family for eleven generations, can trace its documented origin back to 1695 in Horst, in the south of the Netherlands, when Petrus de Kuyper registered a cooperage business (de Kuyper literally means “the cooper” in Dutch). In 1752, the family got into distilling genever when Petrus’s son Jan started or bought a distillery in Schiedam (accounts differ), the satellite town of Rotterdam where local authorities had decreed all the distilleries should site themselves, instead of in Rotterdam’s city center. Schiedam grew to be one of the world’s powerhouse distilling cities, with almost four hundred distilleries by the end of the 1800s, and De Kuyper flourished. The company concentrated on genever but, like their Amsterdam-based competitor Bols, would produce market-specific versions of whatever would sell: vodka, gin, and other products. The company began concentrating on liqueur production in 1920 and currently produces the world’s most extensive range of liqueurs by some distance. As with Bols, liqueur production has also been largely outsourced to flavor houses and third parties. In 1933, in a partnership with the National Distillers Corporation, De Kuyper began also manufacturing their products in the United States for the North American market. When the James B. Beam Distilling Co. (now Beam-Suntory) bought National Distillers in 1986, they also acquired De Kuyper’s American operation. De Kuyper liqueurs produced by Beam-Suntory for the US market in the United States differ significantly in packaging and contents from what is produced in the Netherlands, which more or less supplies the rest of the world.
genever and Bols.De Kuyper website. https://www.dekuyper.com (accessed March 2, 2021).
By: Philip Duff