Region & History

Baarle-Nassau sits so close to the Belgian border that the line runs right through houses and gardens. The result is a patchwork of Dutch and Belgian plots. Postal workers and tax authorities have shared jurisdiction here for centuries. In the middle of this tangled border, Fred van Zuidam founded a small distillery in 1975: a single copper pot still on 300 square meters.

A year later, he and his wife Hélène went professional, distilling liqueurs and genever under the name Zuidam Distillers. This wasn't starting from scratch. Genever has been distilled from malted grain for centuries. Anyone already mashing for a juniper spirit already knows malt and copper stills inside out.

In 1996, the family filled the first barrels intended not for genever but for whisky – just an experiment, nothing more. It took over ten years for that experiment to become a finished product. In early 2007, Master Distiller Patrick van Zuidam brought the first Dutch whisky to market. He named it Millstone, after the millstones that once ground the malt for the country's distilleries.

It was first sold in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and, surprisingly far afield, Japan. Today the distillery has grown to 3,600 square meters. Four copper stills stand in a row, and over a thousand barrels rest in the warehouse. Yet Zuidam has remained what it was in 1975: a family business, not a corporation.

Genever and whisky are still made in the same halls today, often from the same raw materials, just aimed at different goals. One barely rests, the other ages in the barrel for years. To understand Zuidam's story, you have to see both sides together.