The Scent of Anise

Springorums in Rinsche Anijsvat

A Beginning in Amsterdam

When Gerardus Hendricus Springorum was born in Amsterdam in 1816, the city was no longer the proud world power of its Golden Age. Yet it still breathed commerce and toil: barges plied the canals, markets rang with shouts and rattling wheels, and in the Jordaan — a neighborhood of artisans, laborers, and small traders — the boy’s life began. He would one day find his calling among copper kettles and the sharp-sweet haze of spices.

His parents owned no property. They lived as part of the multitude, sustained by work and mutual dependence. Fortune — or necessity — led Gerardus into a trade with centuries of history in Amsterdam: the distilling of brandy and liqueur. In the distillery of Van Zuylekom he would learn what it meant to be a boy at the bottom of a workshop, his labor heavy, his senses forever marked by pungent vapors.

The Jordaan and Its Distilleries

The Jordaan in the early nineteenth century was a quarter of cramped alleys and narrow houses, where families lived and labored in the same dim rooms. Among them stood the distillery known as the Rinsche Anijsvat, in the hands of the Van Zuylekom family since 1754. The building, on the Anjeliersgracht — the canal that would later be filled in and renamed the Westerstraat — rose like a bastion of smell and sound. Water once flowed there; the canal was eventually buried under cobbles. Yet the memory of it lingered in the neighborhood, a silent echo of what had been.

Passersby recognized the place at once: a sweet cloud drifted from the windows and chimneys, a mingling of anise, cinnamon, sugar, and spirit. The distillery supplied not only Amsterdam’s taverns and coffee houses but the shipping trade, and later even distant markets overseas. For a boy from the Jordaan, work at Van Zuylekom promised survival, if not comfort.

First Day as Apprentice

Gerardus’s first day in the distillery, about 1832, began before dawn. He stood in the Anjeliersgracht before the heavy wooden gate. From within came the roar of fire, the clatter of metal, the thud of barrels. When the gate swung open, heat engulfed him, drenched with the tang of herbs and molten sugar. He stepped into the cavern of copper and flame and saw the world that would claim him.

The lowest tasks were his: rinsing bottles in icy water, rolling empty barrels down to the cellar, hauling wood and coal for the fires. His fingers cracked and reddened, his back bent beneath the loads. Yet always his eyes rose to the copper stills where the senior men worked, as if in those gleaming bellies lay secrets of wealth and mastery. Every gesture was ritual: weighing spices, pouring syrup, stirring the steaming liquid. For Gerardus, it seemed sorcery disguised as toil.

Craft and Its Dangers

Distilling had prestige, but it was not safe. Alcohol fumes clung to the rafters, ready to flash into flame. The fires beneath the kettles could, in an instant, consume the room. In the Jordaan stories were told: of stills that burst, of men crushed under falling barrels. Gerardus knew the tales. Each day he crossed the threshold he felt them in his bones. Labor and risk, he thought, were two faces of the same reality.

Yet there was pride as well. The moment when vapors condensed, when the scent of anise and cinnamon curled into clear liquid — that was proof of skill. Every bottle leaving the distillery bore the unseen signature of their craft. Gerardus learned to read that invisible mark; it became the language of his existence.

Liquor as Blessing and Curse

In the Jordaan liquor was everywhere. It warmed cold nights, eased grief, lent courage to weary bodies. But it also bred quarrels, debt, and illness. Gerardus saw fathers drink away wages, mothers clutching their children in despair. He himself helped fill the barrels that fed the taverns. Bread for his family was paid for by the ruin of others.

This double truth weighed on him. No tradesman in the Jordaan escaped it. For the Springorums, the distillery would be both a source of pride and a seed of doubt — a legacy that would echo across generations.

From Apprentice to Master

Years passed. Gerardus grew in knowledge: the mixtures of herbs, the timing of heat, the rhythm of flame and water. The foremen trusted him more; he was allowed to tend the still, no longer only to sweep the floors. To become liqueur master was a leap, yet not an impossible one. It required skill, endurance, and the favor of the guild. For a boy who had started as a drudge, the road was rough, but Gerardus knew persistence was his only chance.

The esteem of a liqueur master was real. His name clung to the quality of the drink; his judgment decided whether a batch reached the market or was poured away. For a family like the Springorums, it meant a step upward. And so, in the decades after Gerardus, at least two more generations found their place in the same distillery, until the name Springorum was woven into the fate of Van Zuylekom.

The Jordaan Changes

The Jordaan itself altered. In 1861 the Anjeliersgracht was filled in, and where water once glistened the broad Westerstraat now stretched. The distillery remained, its facade at numbers 176–180, but the quarter grew bleak. Poverty and cholera raged through the alleys; children grew in cramped rooms; the stench of open sewers lingered. Still the stills roared, as if time within the walls kept a measure different from that of the streets outside.

In 1861 the Anjeliersgracht was filled in. Once it had carried trade and traffic; by then it had become an open sewer. Workshops and factories, among them Van Zuylekom’s distillery, poured their warm waste water into it. The stench bred sickness, and the city decided the canal must vanish beneath paving stones. It was called progress — though with it vanished a fragment of the old city’s life.

Three Generations of Labor

The Springorums clung to the Westerstraat. Sons followed fathers, names passed down, labor repeated. For them the distillery was no romance but reality: long days, little rest, stern discipline. Yet there was pride, too, for in every bottle that left Amsterdam lay a trace of their labor — visible to none but felt by all who drank.

Epilogue: An Enduring Echo

Walk the Westerstraat today and pause at number 178. You will see another signboard: Gall & Gall, a modern liquor shop. The gabled facade still stands, its clock-gable eighteenth-century, but the world within has changed. And yet the echo is clear. On the very spot where Gerardus Hendricus once rinsed bottles and rolled barrels, liquor is still traded.

Thus the story ends in a circle. What began in sweat and fire, amid the reek of anise and cinnamon, continues in the polished glass of a shop window. The names are different, the times have shifted, but the scent of drink remains. For the Springorums, it is the quiet reminder that labor, however humble, leaves its trace in a city — sometimes in stone, sometimes in smell, sometimes in a name still spoken centuries later.