Who Owns Van Kleef?

Lambertus Theodorus van Kleef founded his distillery on the Lange Beestenmarkt in The Hague's old center in 1842, producing fine liqueurs, bitters, and jenever, the Dutch predecessor of gin. The house grew into a full steam distillery of the first class, producing, importing, and exporting an extensive range of distilled drinks sold through its adjoining liquor shop.

At its height The Hague supported multiple jenever houses, and Van Kleef's jenever won recognition abroad, including an award at a Paris exhibition in 1892, the same year the distillery introduced a steam boiler. The original shopfront, added around 1870, survives in the current building.

The family sold the business to H. Averdieck in 1964, and declining demand for traditional jenever finally caught up with the house in 1986, when Van Kleef closed as the last operating distillery in The Hague. The company archive was transferred to The Hague's municipal archive, and the distillery building behind the shop was demolished because of fire risk from alcohol production in the old city center.

NV Stadsherstel bought the property in 1987 and the restored shop and distillery reopened around 1991. A restart under successive entrepreneurs failed, and in 2000 Louis Centazzo and partner Fleur Kruyt made the definitive relaunch: a working museum, liquor shop, and wholesale operation in the original premises, with eight surviving alcohol cellars beneath the museum garden holding capacity for some 37,000 liters.

Centazzo died unexpectedly in 2015, and Kruyt has run the business since. Today Van Kleef sells traditional recipe jenevers, liqueurs, and bitters, hosts tastings and private events, and operates one of the few remaining distillery museums in the Netherlands.