Vintage 1950s Herman Jansen Cloth Coaster ☘️ Two, Spicy Leprechaun, Since 1777!

What Was Louter Kabouter? ☘️ Two Herman Jansen "Drink Louter Kabouter" Coasters, Schiedam, Anno 1777

Size: 3 3/4" across ~ A set of two.

You get two of these thick, soft, scallop-edged drink coasters, each printed in red and black with a jolly little bearded gnome in a pointed cap, striding along with a bottle held high over his head. Ribbon banners wrap around him with the slogan DRINK LOUTER KABOUTER, then ANNO 1777 in red, and HERMAN JANSEN, SCHIEDAM across the bottom. A red line runs around the wavy edge. The backs are plain cream fiber. They were made to soak up a spill, and these never did.

🧙 The Kabouter

That little fellow is a kabouter, the Dutch word for a gnome, and "Drink Louter Kabouter" means "Drink Pure Kabouter." Kabouter was Herman Jansen's jenever, the Dutch gin, and the gnome has a famous father. In 1943, in the middle of the war, distiller Herman Jansen asked Marten Toonder, the Rotterdam cartoonist who became probably the most successful comic artist in the Netherlands, famous for Tom Puss and Ollie B. Bumble, to come up with a worthy trademark for his Kabouter jenever. Toonder's studio drew a whole story, "Het recept van Pinneke Proost," The Recipe of Pinneke Proost, about a house gnome who works for an 18th-century Schiedam distiller named Herman Janszoon and exposes a swindler promising a better jenever. Some of the drawing was done by Toonder's colleague Hans G. Kresse. The ads ran in Metro, a satirical resistance paper, during and just after the war, though the story itself wasn't published until October 16, 1995, in an edition of just 300 copies.

🥃 Herman Jansen, Since 1777

The ANNO 1777 is the real founding date. That year a man named Pieter started a jenever distillery in Schiedam, and the Herman of the name was his great-grandson, who grew the business. The company was exporting to Africa, America and Asia by 1895, went through mergers and joint ventures in the 1960s and 1970s and traded as UTO for a while, and took back the Herman Jansen name in 2011. The seventh generation of the Jansen family runs it today, with Dutch spirits like Sonnema and NOTARIS jenever, which it has owned since 1987, alongside brands such as Savoy Club, Tribelle Triple Sec and Delaforce Port.

And Schiedam is the place for it. The town, right next to Rotterdam, had the world's first known commercial distillery in 1575, its 18th century was a golden age of gin, and its jenever was exported all over the world. The gin trade earned it the nickname "Black Nazareth," and its five windmills, De Noord, Walvisch, Drie Koornbloemen, Nieuwe Palmboom and Vrijheid, are the tallest traditional windmills in the world, built high to catch the wind over the warehouses. In French and English, schiedam even became a word for the town's jenever.

They'd be perfect under a glass on a home bar, or framed together for anybody who loves Dutch gin, old breweriana, or a good gnome.