7 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest proof
On record from 1618; the building is dated to about 1888.
Grade A · DocumentedBy claim, the oldest bar in Amsterdam is Café De Druif on the Eastern Islands, which advertises 1585 and the patronage of Admiral Piet Hein. By evidence it is a different house in the centre of town: De Drie Fleschjes on the Gravenstraat, where archival research for the city's 750th anniversary found a drinking house on the spot in 1618, under the name Het Sufflet. The same research dates De Druif itself to 1863.
Amsterdam is the one city on this site whose oldest-bar claims have been systematically checked and published. For the city's 750th anniversary the historian Maarten Hell worked through the archives behind the familiar stories and found that most of them were written long after the events they describe. De Druif did not pour for Admiral Piet Hein in 1585 but opened in 1863. Café Chris did not pay the builders of the Westerkerk in 1624, because no bar stood at the address before 1882. Het Aepjen, perhaps the most photographed old building in the city, has only held a bar since 1991. What survives the audit is a genuinely old trade in two forms. The bruin café is a neighbourhood institution, brown with a century of tobacco and held together by its regulars. The proeflokaal is a distiller's tasting room, where jenever is poured to the brim of a tulip glass and the first sip is taken with your hands behind your back. Amsterdam's oldest documented drinking house is one of the latter.
The useful thing about the Amsterdam research is that it shows how these claims usually go wrong, and it is almost never by deliberate invention. A building is old, a neighbourhood is old, a family memory is long, and at some point in the twentieth century all three get rolled together into a founding date on the window. De Druif is a lovely old bar on a quiet harbourside square that happens to have opened in 1863. Café Chris is a proper Jordaan local that postdates the Westerkerk by two and a half centuries, and whose lavatory is famously flushed from outside the cubicle. Café De Karpershoek near Centraal Station comes out rather well: an inn called De Oldenburger Kelder is recorded on its spot in 1641, which makes its own claim of 1606 possible if unproven.
The two tasting rooms are the ones to go out of your way for. De Drie Fleschjes has barrels along the walls, almost nowhere to sit, and the strongest documentary case in the city. Wynand Fockink still runs its copper stills behind the counter, down an alley a few steps from the Dam. For brown cafés, Café Hoppe on the Spui has a narrow standing bar in the old house at number 18 and a later room next door, while Café ’t Papeneiland has Delft tiles, a potbelly stove and the apple pie that Bill Clinton praised in 2011. We have arranged them into a route in Amsterdam’s brown cafés, and the national list is at the oldest pubs in the Netherlands.
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Amsterdam, North Holland
The 1585 dates a distillery, not a café, and comes from the local press: Oost Online reports that the De Druif liqueur distillery dates from 1585 and that a café is said to have been in the building from 1631, while rejecting the story that the admiral Piet Hein drank here — he was dead by then. Amsterdam750 goes further and finds that De Druif began as a drinking house only in 1863.
Amsterdam, North Holland
The 1606 is the Amsterdam press's: Mokum Magazine states flatly that the brown café dates from 1606. Amsterdam750's review of the archives is more careful — an inn named De Oldenburger Kelder is recorded on this spot in 1641, with one indication from 1606 that drink was already sold here — so the earlier year is possible but unproven.
Amsterdam, North Holland
The 1624 is the café's own claim, and Amsterdam750 records it as such before testing it: Café Chris says it dates from 1624 and poured beer for the men building the Westertoren. Amsterdam750 found no evidence of a drinking house at this address before the 19th century, with café use documented from 1882.
Amsterdam, North Holland
The Dutch national monuments register describes Prinsengracht 2 as a corner house with stepped gables to the street and the side, decorated with heavy arched blocks, and dates it 1641 — a year off the 1642 the cafe gives, and near enough to hold the claim up. Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser, which has owned the house since 1918 and is the second publisher this row needed, gives the same year: built in 1641 as a shop
Amsterdam, North Holland
The city historian Maarten Hell, whose book on the Amsterdam herberg covers 1450 to 1800, went through the archives for Amsterdam750 and found a drinking house on this spot already in 1618, under the name Het Sufflet — older than the 1650 the proeflokaal claims, and the reason this row is graded A. Hell also notes why earlier evidence is thin everywhere in the city: tap licences were only kept systematically from
Amsterdam, North Holland
Hoppe states it has been on the Spui since 1670, originally as a distiller's tasting room, but no primary record for that date was found in the sources checked. The standing bar at no. 18 is the old part; the seated room next door came into the café in the early twentieth century, and that is a fact about the business rather than about the building, which this page had confused. The Dutch national monuments
Amsterdam, North Holland
The 1679 record is the founding of a small distillery in the Pijlsteeg by Jan Bierman. Wynand Fockink, enrolled as a citizen of Amsterdam in 1725, took the business over around 1730. Distilling and selling bottles is not serving over a bar: the Vereniging Vrienden van de Amsterdamse Binnenstad dates the tasting room's surviving interior to 1860, which is the earliest evidence found here for drinking on the premises.
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