A Jordaan family firm and a stork from The Hague.

A. van Wees is a genever and liqueur distillery in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. Its full name, A. van Wees Distilleerderij De Ooievaar — ooievaar is Dutch for stork — joins two businesses, and the company’s own history keeps their dates apart.

The first is the family firm. The company says that in 1922 Adriaan van Wees took over the distillery and wine merchant of Henri Matveld, a business it dates to 1883, and settled on the Driehoekstraat, where the distillery still is. His granddaughter, Fenny van Wees, gave the same starting point in an interview with ABN AMRO’s Financial Focus in November 2025: her grandfather began in 1922 with a building in the Jordaan. The Dutch Centre for Intangible Heritage, KIEN, noted on its fine-distillation page that the family’s centenary would be marked in 2022. The company’s website pairs two dates, “A. van Wees anno 1883” and “De Ooievaar anno 1782.”

The second business is De Ooievaar itself. The company describes it as a distillery and bitters works, the Stokerij en Bitterfabriek De Ooievaar, founded in The Hague in 1782, and says the present firm is a merger of the two; it does not give the year they came together. A review of Fenny van Wees’s book on the Dutch food site Favorflav says her father learned fine distilling at De Ooievaar while it was still based in The Hague.

The van Wees family has owned and run the business since 1922. Fenny van Wees told Financial Focus that her father, Cees van Wees, took over in 1955; Favorflav says she took over from him in 2002. Her daughters Nikki and Marlous Swart work in the business, and Financial Focus described them as the fourth generation; the company says Nikki is learning the craft.

Malt wine bought in, juniper added, distilled again.

A. van Wees is a fine distiller — in Dutch, a fijndistillateur — rather than a malt-wine maker, and it is open about the difference. The company says it buys its malt wine, the grain spirit at the heart of genever, from specialist malt-wine distillers, then distils it again with juniper berries and herbs in copper stills of up to 240 litres, as Amsterdam fine distillers once did with malt wine bought from Weesp and Schiedam. Its brandy, the base for liqueurs, it distils itself. Genevers are kept and matured in oak casks, and the company says bottling is done by hand or semi-automatically, with corks, ribbons, labels and wax seals applied largely by hand.

That craft has public recognition. KIEN, which keeps the Netherlands’ national inventory of intangible cultural heritage, added fine distillation (fijndistillatie) to the inventory in September 2016. Its entry describes genever distilled from purchased malt wine, juniper and herbs, twice — first in a fine still, then in a rectifying still — and liqueurs made from brandy, fruits, nuts, flowers and herbs, and it names Van Wees as a place where “the knowledge is passed on from father to children.”

The range is wide. Fenny van Wees told Financial Focus in 2025 that the distillery makes about sixty liqueurs and seventeen genevers, within a range of some four hundred products. Its website lists young, old and very old genevers, among them Roggenaer, Loyaal aan traditie and zeer oude genevers matured for ten, fifteen and twenty years, alongside korenwijn, bitters, a dry gin called Three Corners, and esprits, distillates the company sells as eetparfum, “edible perfume,” and which Favorflav describes as made for chocolatiers and pastry chefs. Newer products named in the 2025 interview include a yuzu liqueur and Hemel op Aarde, a liqueur made with, among other things, brandy, honey, cacao and cherries. English Wikipedia lists Van Wees among the makers of jenever in Amsterdam, with The Stillery and Wynand Fockink.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all genever names from the Netherlands and Belgium: Rutte, Nolet, Wenneker, Hooghoudt, Filliers, Zuidam and A. van Wees. Genever — also spelled jenever — is the juniper-flavoured spirit of the Low Countries, traditionally distilled from malt wine (moutwijn), and English Wikipedia says modern gin derives from the historical genevers introduced to Great Britain.

The name is protected. English Wikipedia says the European Union protects genever as a geographical indication, with eleven specific types, which may be made only in the Netherlands and Belgium and in small neighbouring areas of France and Germany. The best-known distinction is between jonge (young) and oude (old) genever, which refers to the recipe rather than to age: under the rules Wikipedia summarises, jonge genever may contain no more than 15 per cent malt wine, oude genever at least 15 per cent, and korenwijn between 51 and 70 per cent.

The craft itself has heritage status in the Netherlands. In September 2016 the Dutch Centre for Intangible Heritage, KIEN, added fijndistillatie — fine distillation, in which, KIEN says, genever is distilled from purchased malt wine with juniper berries and herbs — to the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage.

Genever has its own geography. English Wikipedia names Schiedam, Groningen, Amsterdam and Delft in the Netherlands, and Hasselt, Deinze, Aalst and Liège in Belgium, among the towns known for it, and the brands here are spread across both countries rather than gathered in one place. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its genever is distilled and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Tasting rooms, wax seals and Amsterdam lettering.

For most of its history the firm sold in bulk. The company says that until 1970 it delivered its drinks to cafés and restaurants across the Netherlands in casks and wicker-covered demijohns; in the 1970s specialist liquor shops began to stock its genevers and liqueurs, and at the end of the decade Cees van Wees chose craft distilling as the core of the business and gave up its other activities.

The brand is also met in its own bars. In 1973 the family opened Proeflokaal A. van Wees at Herengracht 319, then called De Admiraal, the tasting room’s website says; it still pours the distillery’s genevers and liqueurs, and an original pump from the distilling process is built into the bar. AmsterdamNow reported in March 2026 that the room was built in a former alley between buildings, with its old clinker bricks kept as the floor, and in May 2025 described a second, one-room tasting room, Proeflokaal De Ooievaar, on the Sint Olofspoort near Central Station, which serves only A. van Wees drinks.

The clearest documented piece of design is a book. In 2018 Fenny van Wees published Distilleren – De kunst van het ruiken (“Distilling – the art of smelling”), a 288-page hardback from Uitgeverij Loopvis with a foreword by Youp van ’t Hek. Fonts In Use records that it was designed and illustrated by Jelle F. Post, with body text in Xavier Dupré’s Vista Sans and titling in Kurversbrug, Ramiro Espinoza’s homage to the lettering on Amsterdam’s bridges. The sealed book came in a red paper wrapper printed with bottles, its blurb set in Krul, a Re-Type revival of the lettering that the Dutch sign painter Jan Willem Joseph Visser painted on Amsterdam’s brown cafés from the late 1940s.

For a design guide, A. van Wees shows how a small distillery carries its identity through craft details — wax seals, stoneware, aged genevers and the lettering of the city’s bars — more than through a logo. Compare Bols, another Amsterdam genever and liqueur house, and De Kuyper, the family liqueur house of Schiedam. For this guide we use wax-seal red, genever amber and stoneware with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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