Editorial
The bar guide to Amsterdam is not the guide to Amsterdam that most people think they need. The city has a reputation built on coffee shops and bachelor parties, which obscures the fact that it has one of Europe's strongest craft beer cultures, a cocktail scene that has been developing seriously for the past decade, and a network of brown cafes that represent one of the world's great pub traditions. This guide ignores the tourist circuit and covers the bars that Amsterdam residents actually use.
The geography helps here. Amsterdam is compact enough to walk between most of these bars in under 30 minutes. The Jordaan, De Pijp, and the area around Leidseplein form the core of the good drinking. The canal ring is beautiful to walk between bars but thin on quality inside the bars themselves, with a handful of exceptions.
A brown cafe, or bruin kroeg, is the Dutch answer to the English pub, the French bistrot, and the Irish local all at once. The name comes from the brown-stained walls and ceilings, decades of tobacco smoke absorbed into the wood. These places are not trying to be anything other than what they are, which is why they are among the most comfortable bars on earth to spend an afternoon in.
The Dutch craft beer movement is 15 years old and genuinely world-class. Amsterdam has 40-odd dedicated craft beer venues, a significant percentage of which stock Dutch breweries that export almost nothing. Breweries like Brouwerij 't IJ, Oedipus, and Noord have international reputations. The bars that focus on them stock pours you cannot find online.
Amsterdam's cocktail scene has grown significantly in the past five years. The bars that drove this growth are concentrated in the Jordaan, De Pijp, and the newer De Hallen neighbourhood in the west. The quality at the top end now competes with London and Berlin.
Amsterdam's bar scene rewards patience and a willingness to move away from the centre. The best brown cafe in the Jordaan is better than most pubs in Europe. The craft beer scene produces some of the most interesting pours on the continent. The cocktail bars at the top end have arrived at a level that justifies the trek to whichever part of the city they happen to be in.
The hidden gems section of the Amsterdam guide covers 20 bars that we could not fit here. For the complete city picture across all 8 occasions, the Amsterdam bar guide is the place to start. For anyone who wants to drink specifically like a local, the where locals drink in Amsterdam article covers the neighbourhood bars that do not appear in any tourist materials.
Sofia covers Europe's bar scene from a base in London, with extended stays in Paris, Lisbon, and Amsterdam. She spent six months in the Dutch capital researching the brown cafe tradition and has a working knowledge of 40 jenever producers.