Editorial
Amsterdam is the most naturally democratic drinking city in Northern Europe. The brown cafe format, which accounts for perhaps 600 of the city's bars, was built around the premise that a good pint should cost the same as a cup of coffee and taste better. That principle still mostly holds. A Heineken draft in a Jordaan brown cafe runs €3.80 to €4.50. The same beer at an Airbnb-adjacent cocktail bar on the tourist strip runs €8.50.
This guide covers 5 bars across the Jordaan, De Pijp, and the Oost neighbourhood, designed around a budget of €25 for one drink per stop. Our editor Sofia Reeves ran the route on a Tuesday and a Friday evening in March and confirmed every price point. The route is entirely walkable, or connects on the 3-minute tram hops that Amsterdam does better than any city its size.
"Amsterdam invented the brown cafe so that ordinary people could have somewhere extraordinary to sit. The best ones are still extraordinary. And they still cost almost nothing."
Start at Cafe Pieper on the Prinsengracht in the early evening. In de Wildeman is a 15-minute walk east toward Centrum. Cafe de Pels is back in the Jordaan, an 18-minute walk from In de Wildeman, or take tram 2 or 12 back west. Brouwerij Troost is in De Pijp, 25 minutes south on foot from the Jordaan or 12 minutes on tram 3. Bar Noord requires the free ferry from Amsterdam Centraal, which runs every 5 to 8 minutes and is free.
For the full Amsterdam bar scene overview, including neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood recommendations at all price points, our city guide covers 7 distinct bar areas. The best cheap bars in Amsterdam guide covers 20 options across all neighbourhoods. The Jordaan bar-hopping guide covers the same geography in more depth. If this budget approach works for you, the same formula translates well to other European cities — our guides to a budget bar night in Berlin and a budget bar night in Prague follow the same route-planning method.
Sofia covers Europe's bar scene from a base in London, with quarterly reporting trips to Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and the Iberian Peninsula. She has been writing about bars for 11 years and insists that the best bar in any city is never the one that won an award last year.
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