Free Boozehound by Jason Wilson Page B

promised me a taste of her new private bottling of rye whiskey, and I reminded her of this promise. She graciously pulled a hip flask out of her jeans pocket and gave me a nice big swig, right in the lobby.
    LeNell wasn’t the only one with a hip flask in that lobby. A friend of a friend introduced me to an Irish fellow named Phil Duff, who worked for Lucas Bols in Amsterdam. I had actually been looking for this guy for a few days because word had it that Duff was carrying around a hip flask of Dutch genever.
    Genever is the original gin, dating back to the sixteenth century when a chemist in Leyden invented the spirit by adding juniper ( genever , in Dutch) to distilled alcohol. With a traditional recipe that calls for at least 15 percent malt wine, genever—particularly oude (old) genever—has a funky, earthy quality that is unlike any of the London dry gins that most of us know. It’s a flavor that seems to predate the modern world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, genever or “Holland gin” was the preferred gin in the United States. By 1880, six times more genever was imported than all other gins combined, and it was one of only four base spirits mixed for cocktails. After Prohibition, however, the London dry styles took over, and imports of genever slowed to a trickle, until finally it was nearly impossible to find the stuff in America.
    I told Duff that I had spent one very memorable day drinking genever in Amsterdam, and since then I’d pissed away many hours searching for the stuff at home. Duff smiled and said he knew what I meant, produced the flask, and let me take a long sip … Wow. That funkiness and earthiness from the flask took me directly to that Amsterdam afternoon.
    Yes, I realize I’m probably violating some sort of literary law by including two Proustian moments in one chapter, but I don’t care. Proust was writing about a cookie, and not liquor. As Liebling joked in Between Meals , “The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories … In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.”
    Perhaps surprisingly, my afternoon in Amsterdam didn’t involve magic mushrooms or space cakes or spending any quality time with the ladies of the Red Light District. Instead, during that afternoon, I learned the traditional Dutch way of drinking genever in several of the city’s proeflokaal (or tasting rooms) and its brown cafés (so-called because of the dark wood and years of cigarette smoke). The Dutch have a word for the atmosphere in these places: gezellig , which can mean “cozy” or “quaint,” but also connotes togetherness and seeing a friend after a long absence. Gezellig is pretty much untranslatable, much like the joys that spirits bring. (In fact, one could say that this sip of genever from the flask in the hotel lobby was rather gezellig.)
    I happened to be in the Netherlands to write a travel article for a luxury car company’s magazine. I didn’t need to be anywhere for any interviews until Monday, however, and the car company generously sprung for an all-expense-paid weekend in a beautiful hotel in a renovated canal house. As I checked in, Woody Harrelson and his stoner buddies were checking out.
    As luck would have it, I found out that my old friend T., a photographer from Denmark, was in town to shoot Amsterdam’s brand-new Muziekgebouw—“the music hall of the twenty-first century”—but had nothing better to do that afternoon but join me in a bender. I’d met T. years before, when both of us were traveling aimlessly in Iceland, me avoiding work on another failed novel, and she waiting to hear that she would not be accepted by the Royal Art Academy and taking a break from a boyfriend (whom I later deduced was an ecstasy dealer in Copenhagen). Though we don’t see each other often, the two of us have spent dozens upon dozens of hours across from each other drinking at some smoky