Bols Genever (700 ml)

When Jerry Thomas published his 1862 Bartender's Guide, the spirit in the Martinez and Holland House was this — Bols Genever, the dominant base spirit of 19th-century American cocktail culture, distilled at 31 Pijlsteeg, Amsterdam, steps from Dam Square, on a site tracing to 1679. The house philosophy, Semper Idem (Always the Same), is not a marketing slogan but a production mandate: every batch must match the archive.

The malt-wine backbone is triple-distilled in copper pot stills from a grain mash of malted barley, rye, corn, and wheat, cut deliberately low at approximately 47% ABV to preserve pronounced grain character. That malt wine — comprising over 50% of the final blend — is then married with neutral grain spirit and a separate botanical distillate (juniper, coriander, caraway, aniseed, plus a proprietary ingredient recovered from 17th-century Bols archives), redistilled in the same copper pots. The standard expression is bottled at 42% ABV, unaged.

What no peer in the modern gin category replicates: the malt-wine base gives Bols Genever a structural weight — cereal depth, faint wort sweetness — that sits categorically between whiskey and gin, making it a functionally distinct ingredient rather than a stylistic variation. The botanical register is secondary to grain, not the reverse.