Flying Dutchmen

You’d have to go a long way to find a more impressive, bewitching and complex distilling operation than the one that the Zuidam family run at Baarle Nassau in Holland.

It’s not much to look at – factory style industrial warehouse on the edge of a town which straddles the Belgian border so that for some households the country you live in is dictated by which country your front door faces, irrespective of which side of the line the rest of the house is in.
But enter through the doors of The Zuidam distillery and you’re in to a world of genevers, gins, rums, liqueurs and whiskies, high quality spirits distilled on state-of-the-art purpose-built pot and column stills, often in the smallest of batches.
In all there are about 600 different lines produced here, and because they do things here properly, spending up to 16 months extracting cocoa flavours from beans for instance, keeping production flowing from line to line is complex in the extreme.
“It is a full time job,” says managing director Patrick Zuidam. “My biggest worry is that I will run out of something but at the same time space is the biggest concern to us and I can’t order too much of anything in because there is nowhere to store it. It’s a big headache.”
Because Zuidam is all about premium distilling and using the very best ingredients – for example, the factory imports juicy fresh vanilla pods in batches from Madagascar – production schedules have to be worked around seasons. The distillery imports oranges from only two countries, for instance, so because Spanish oranges are ready now, that’s what is being produced now.
With a range of stills and a range of distilling skills required, Zuidam is one of the most flexible distilleries I’ve ever visited. It doesn’t shy away from the tough jobs either. They make rye whisky and genever here, despite the fact that rye turns in to the equivalent of wallpaper glue during production and is notoriously difficult to work.
But the backbone of the operation is genever. Patrick says that the drink’s time as a premium spirit might be coming, as new territories such as Spain, France and the United States increasingly turn to Zuidam’s quality version rather than the standard 10€ version favoured in Holland.
Genever is in the same way as whisky spirit, but a mix of botanicals are added to it, it is then distilled three times (or for korenwijn four times) and it may be matured for much shorter periods of time in oak. In the case of Zuidam’s genevers, in charred virgin oak casks, and in some sherry wood.
The resulting spirit is softer, sweeter and gentler than whisky but nothing like gin. Patrick believes that it is ideal for the modern bar.
“It is ideal in a Manhattan and mixes well in other cocktails,” he says. “It is a fabulous spirit.”
With Zuidam’s spirits stylishly packaged and made with the finest ingredients, the family’s decision many years ago not to compromise on quality is paying off.
“We’ve got 18 people here cutting fruit and hand-labelling bottles,” says Patrick “but we need more space. That’s our only constraint.”