Boozehound (10 page)

Perhaps surprisingly, my afternoon in Amsterdam didn’t involve magic mushrooms or space cakes or spending any quality time with the ladies of the Red Light District. Instead, during that afternoon, I learned the traditional Dutch way of drinking genever in several of the city’s
proeflokaal
(or tasting rooms) and its brown cafés (so-called because of the dark wood and years of cigarette smoke). The Dutch have a word for the atmosphere in these places:
gezellig
, which can mean “cozy” or “quaint,” but also connotes togetherness and seeing a friend after a long absence.
Gezellig
is pretty much untranslatable, much like the joys that spirits bring. (In fact, one could say that this sip of genever from the flask in the hotel lobby was rather gezellig.)

I happened to be in the Netherlands to write a travel article for a luxury car company’s magazine. I didn’t need to be anywhere for any interviews until Monday, however, and the car company generously sprung for an all-expense-paid weekend in a beautiful hotel in a renovated canal house. As I checked in, Woody Harrelson and his stoner buddies were checking out.

As luck would have it, I found out that my old friend T., a photographer from Denmark, was in town to shoot Amsterdam’s brand-new Muziekgebouw—“the music hall of the twenty-first century”—but had nothing better to do that afternoon but join me in a bender. I’d met T. years before, when both of us were traveling aimlessly in Iceland, me avoiding work on another failed novel, and she waiting to hear that she would not be accepted by the Royal Art Academy and taking a break from a boyfriend (whom I later deduced was an ecstasy dealer in Copenhagen). Though we don’t see each other often, the two of us have spent dozens upon dozens of hours across from each other drinking at some smoky table in a café or bar. T. is my one friend who, like me, embraces both gezellig—there’s a similarly untranslatable concept in Danish called
hygge
—and seediness.

Amsterdam, let’s face it, can be pretty seedy. Wonderfully so. Genever was the perfect drink for that afternoon. Genever, especially oude genever, tastes like the incarnation of seediness itself—a primeval taste, truly from a stage further back. The bald bartender with the handlebar mustache at a proeflokaal with sawdust on the floor called Wynand Fockink (yes,
Fockink
is pronounced like you think) poured genever out of earthenware bottles that looked like they’d been excavated from ancient ruins. He filled the cordial glasses just above the rim; we leaned down and slurped the first sip right off the bar. Then we chased the genever with beer. The whole thing is called a
kopstoot
(head butt). T. and I slurped several times.

We moved over to De Drie Fleschjes, another dark, sawdust-on-the-floor spot. There we drank the house specialty, shots of
jonge
(young) genever, curaçao, and bitters called Boswandeling (A Walk in the Forest.) Then, we moved on to Proeflokaal de Ooievaar, where the drunk at the bar told T., very specifically—in Dutch that was expertly translated by his buddy—what sorts of dirty things he would like to do to her.

As the sun started to set, we figured we were already in the Red Light District, and so we decided, what the hell, let’s go see a live sex show. Neither of us had seen a live sex show before, and so we entered a theater called Casa Rosso—“one of the most superior erotic shows in the world, with a tremendous choreography and a high-level cast.” We had another kopstoot at the theater bar. The sex show may have been one of the most unerotic things I’ve ever seen, weirdly stylized with lots of pumped-up muscles and fake boobs and tans. “He just looks like he’s doing gymnastics on top of her,” T. said, and we both dissolved into hysterics. At a certain point, a naked woman came out with tassels on her nipples and danced as if she were having a seizure. We nearly screamed. Really, we were louder than the crew of British lads on stag weekend behind us. The real couples—the ones who’d actually come to the show to theoretically add some kind of spark to their lovemaking—started shooting us nasty looks. So at the intermission, we bailed.

After the sex show, we went to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen Amsterdam, where reformed juvenile delinquents cook dinner for you. This is where things took a strange turn. T., normally quiet and mellow, got into an argument with the waitress. Then she and I got into a heated debate about the nature of friendship and love and memory, which revolved around dueling reminiscences of a night in Iceland when we’d driven up to a hill above the town to make a photo of the northern lights. On that night, she’d set up her camera on a tripod and pointed it at the sky, while the car radio played Icelandic pop music, and we stood in the dark. The shot needed a long exposure, and T. left the shutter open while we waited as if we had all the time in the world. We knew we didn’t, of course. Now, our debate—over dinner in Amsterdam cooked by reformed juvenile delinquents and accompanied by more genever—centered around what could have or should have happened, but didn’t, that night in Iceland many years ago.

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, in the gift shop. And you can make a video of yourself flipping bottles and email it to friends.

I hadn’t really thought about flair bartending for many years. It’s been, after all, more than two decades since Cruise portrayed an acrobatic, poetry-reciting bartender. In fact, allow me to quote one of his poems from the film:

I am the last barman poet. / I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make. / Americans getting stinky on something I stir or shake. / The Sex on the Beach / The schnapps made from peach / The Velvet Hammer / The Alabama Slammer. / I make things with juice and froth. / The Pink Squirrel / The Three-Toed Sloth. / I make drinks so sweet and snazzy. / The Iced Tea / The Kamakazi / The Orgasm / The Death Spasm / The Singapore Sling / The Dingaling. / America, you’ve just been devoted to every flavor I got. / But if you want to got loaded / Why don’t you just order a shot? / Bar is open.

Some might say that this poem (and the entire film itself) pinpoints precisely the nadir of bartending in the twentieth century. Just look at the list of drinks. Long Island Iced Tea? Alabama Slammer? Orgasm? Maybe the classic-cocktail crowd should lobby for a remake: Tom Cruise could be replaced by a hipster who comes to work at a popular speakeasy in Brooklyn.

Inspired, I bought two practice flair bottles from the gift shop in hopes of auditioning for the potential remake (possibly as the grizzled older bartender who takes the young upstart under his wing). Once home, I immediately spilled a lot of liquor on my kitchen floor, and then put the bottles away, never to be practiced with again.

A couple of days after visiting Bols, I took a train to the historic distilling town of Schiedam, near Rotterdam. As late as 1880, Schiedam boasted about four hundred distilleries, with dozens of windmills in operation to produce the malt for its famous genever. But as worldwide demand for genever diminished over the course of the twentieth century, Schiedam ebbed into a quiet, pleasant town with canals, cobblestone streets, and six windmills still in operation.

At least until the remaining distillers realized they could export expensive vodka to the Americans. It wasn’t a hard transition. Vodka is made from neutral spirits. And the distilleries were already making genever out of neutral spirits. So, hold the malt wine, tinker a bit, and voila! For instance, Nolet Distillery in Schiedam sells jonge genever under the label Ketel 1 for about ten dollars a liter. Now, it sells vodka under the label Ketel One (numeral spelled out) for more than thirty dollars a liter.

That’s not to say there weren’t unique flavors in Schiedam. For instance, I made a stop at the Jenever Museum, chronicling three hundred years of Dutch distilling tradition, where I
ate
a bowl of a custardlike spirit made with egg yolks and brandy called
advocaat
. After that, I sampled some small local brands at Jeneverie ’t Spul. The bartender there certainly didn’t want to hear anything about a genever specially made to Americans’ taste. In fact, he deplored cocktails, the existence of which he blamed on Americans. Moreover, as I drank some of his finest aged genever, he make it clear that it was the Canadians, and not the Americans, who’d liberated Schiedam in World War II. In fact, to make the point, he showed off a portrait of the Canadian general on the wall.