Netherlands

The Dutch contribution to fermentation has less to do with their own drinking than with everyone else's. Dutch merchants ran the sixteenth and seventeenth century trade in brandewijn, wine boiled down for the voyage, and in doing so effectively created the market that turned Cognac and Armagnac into industries.

At home the drink is jenever, made by distilling a mash of malted grain into what is called malt wine and flavouring it with juniper. Lucas Bols began distilling in Amsterdam in 1575, and by the nineteenth century Schiedam had hundreds of malt wine distilleries working at once. Oude jenever keeps a high proportion of that malt wine, which is why it tastes closer to a young whisky than to gin, and why the best of it was sold in stoneware that protects the contents better than glass.