Proeflokaal de Ooievaar (The Stork) occupies a tiny brick room on Sint Olofspoort, the alley that connects Zeedijk to Nieuwebrugsteeg behind Amsterdam Centraal. The bar belongs to A. van Wees, the family distillery whose flagship tasting house sits a tram ride south on Herengracht; this Olofspoort outpost is the quieter, older, locals-leaning sibling. The address, the trade name and the egg-on-the-bar custom are unchanged from the description on the official A. van Wees site.
The right visitor wants 30 minutes of aged Dutch gin and one Amstel before moving on. The wrong visitor wants a sit-down dinner, table service or a full cocktail programme. The room seats maybe a dozen at a stretch; everyone else stands at the marble bar or spills onto the cobbles of the alley. Treat it as a stop, not a destination, and the bar rewards the visit.
The space is a single brick-walled room with a low ceiling, wood beams and stained glass set into the doorway. Rows of antique clay jenever bottles line the back wall behind the marble bar. The In Your Pocket Amsterdam guide describes the venue as "an ancient bar offering dozens of traditional jenevers" and notes the bottles on the wall as the defining visual. There is no music, no menu hand-out and nowhere to sit beyond two short benches in the front bay window.
The pour to ask for is one of the wood-aged jeneverers from the A. van Wees range — the 12-year and the 25-year sit at the top of the chalk list and cost in the €7–9 range per tulip-shaped glass. The traditional move is to lean over the bar, mouth-first, and sip the first millimetre without lifting the glass (the kopstootje). Drop an Amstel chaser next to it and you have the local order in two motions. Wanderlog and Tripadvisor reviewers consistently flag the 25-year as the "old whiskey" pour worth trying once.
Skip the cocktail conversation; there is no cocktail conversation. The bar deals in jenever, korenwijn and a tight rack of A. van Wees liqueurs (the apricot and the cinnamon are the popular ones). The boiled egg is the ritual snack — pulled from the rack on the bar, peeled at the counter, dipped in salt. Eating Europe's jenever guide calls it part of the bar's "small but quirky" food offer.
Early evening is regulars — older men nursing single pours, off-duty bartenders from the surrounding hospitality grid, a handful of office workers coming up from Zeedijk. The cross-over hits around 21:00 when Centraal Station empties tourists into the lane; from then on the room is half locals, half jenever-curious visitors, all standing. Friday and Saturday nights it stays packed until close at 03:00. Cityseeker and the In Your Pocket listing both note the standing crush after 21:00 as a feature, not a bug.