Amsterdam · 5 stops · every stop verified in live map data · ends near a bed
A bruine kroeg is brown because four centuries of smoke got into the paint and nobody has ever had the heart to strip it. Five of them, east to west, from a sailors' house on the Zeedijk to a distiller's front room in the Jordaan. Small glasses, filled to the brim, taken slowly. Doe maar rustig aan.
Amsterdam burned down twice and then banned building in wood, so only two wooden houses are left in the whole city. This is one of them, up since about 1550, and it has poured drink for most of that time. It was a sailors' lodging house on the Zeedijk, and the story that will not die is that men back from the Indies with no money settled the bill in monkeys. Whether or not the innkeeper ever kept a cage of them, Dutch still says in de aap gelogeerd, lodged with the monkeys, and it means you are in trouble. Low beams, bare wood, and beer.
Down an alley behind the Dam, in a tasting room the distillery has kept since 1679. There are no chairs and that is not an oversight. The genever is poured to the meniscus, standing proud of the rim, and it cannot be lifted without spilling, so you put your hands behind your back and bend to the glass. Everybody does it, nobody laughs, and the bow is three hundred years old. Ask for a kopstootje if you want the beer alongside. Drink one, drink two, then go.
distilling since 1679 · afternoon into the evening · verified Aug 2026
No music, and none is wanted. The room is quiet enough that you can hear the whole bar bow at once.
3 · The Anchor Café Hoppe
Two doors on the Spui, and you want the left one. The old bar has been open since 1670, has sand thrown on the floor some nights, and does not do table service: you stand, you shout your order, you hold your glass. At six the crowd comes out of the offices and takes the pavement, and the square stops being a square and becomes a room with no ceiling. This is the anchor because it is the least comfortable stop on the road and the one everybody remembers.
On the corner where the Prinsengracht meets the Brouwersgracht, up since 1642, with a Delft-tiled bar and a stove in the middle of the floor. The name means papists' island. When Catholic mass was banned there was a clandestine church across the water at Prinsengracht 7, and the cellar of this building holds the mouth of a tunnel that ran under the canal so priests could be moved without being seen. People come for the apple pie now, including one American president in 2011, and it is worth the queue. Sit at the front window and watch two canals at once.
Pieter Hoppe came from Germany, took over a wine shop on this gracht in 1780, and by 1786 he was distilling genever in it and selling it over this counter. He did well enough to buy most of the even side of the street and to purchase Amsterdam citizenship in 1804. The spirit casks behind the bar are his. Heineken took the building in 1973 and reopened it as a café in 1978, and two men took it on again in 2024 to put the brown back. There is a terrace on the water, on a deck the width of a barge. If a seat opens on it, that seat is yours, and it is the best place in the Jordaan to finish. Bed is four minutes over the bridges.
🎁 One more on the Zeedijk, a hundred metres from where you started. Bet van Beeren opened Café 't Mandje in 1927 and ran it as the one room in the city where prostitutes, sailors, pimps and women who loved women could drink at the same bar. She cut the ties off men who annoyed her and hung them from the beams. She died in 1967, her sister Greet kept it going until 1982, and then Greet locked the door and left everything exactly where it stood for twenty-six years. Just before she died in 2007 she arranged for it to open again. Their niece reopened it on 29 April 2008, with the same ties still hanging.
Fly in via AMS. The live map shows every pub, bar and restaurant around the route, compiled from OpenStreetMap and Google with live ratings.