Jenever museum

Today we visited the Van Kleef distillery and museum here in The Hague.  The distillery has a fascinating history dating back to 1842 when it was founded by Theodorus van Kleef. Although the distillery closed in 1986 it was reopened years later in 1995 after extensive renovations and is the only surviving distillery of jenever and liqueur in the city. Today the distillery is one of the country’s oldest, and it is said that Vincent Van Gogh once frequented it, having lived a couple of houses down the street at number 32 from 1869 to 1873.The museum is a lively, tiny place packed with shelves and shelves of all sorts of things relating to liqueur and the distillery’s history. One such finding is a telephone book from 1883. The Van Kleef Museum is the only museum that has this very first telephone book of The Hague. What makes this telephone book so special is that the Van Kleef Distillery actually takes the number one spot in the book (their phone number was literally the number 1). Not even the police or government filled the number one position! This demonstrates the importance and prestige of the distillery in the city during the 1800s.The museum also has 16 metres of archived liqueur and jenever recipes dating from before 1900 and the current owner has attempted to use these old recipes as much as possible in all products to keep with tradition. And just as it was done years ago, no artificial ingredients are used in the process. This makes Van Kleef a real artisan distillery. Today Van Kleef works with five different distillers in the country and they have distribution across the Netherlands with the prospect of exporting to other countries in the future. 
They also have on show some ‘real’ straws that people would drink from many years ago and still in their original packaging. People often wonder where the word ‘straw’ comes from. Straws were actually once made of real, natural straw and not from plastic like they are today. An original feature of Van Kleef is that each of the labels on the bottles is handwritten. In the past the labels were handwritten and they wanted to keep it that way. The Van Kleef Museum is a small gem with a strong story and a steeped history. The staff were very welcoming, warm and down-to-earth. I highly recommend a visit and a combined tasting too.  There is also a beautiful museum garden through the back.