If you are familiar with gin and whisky but never touched a genever, then this spirit is the room your gin walked out of without saying goodbye. The simplest framing is that genever is the missing link between gin and whisky.

Like whisky, genever is fundamentally a grain spirit: traditionally a mash of malted barley, rye, and corn fermented and then pot-distilled. Unlike whisky, this spirit is then either blended with a neutral grain spirit re-distilled with juniper and other botanicals (the gin-like part) or used in much higher proportions, sometimes 100%, with only a whisper of juniper distillate added. The result, depending on the recipe, sits anywhere between vodka with a hint of pine and a malt whisky with a herbal nose.

And if you’ve ever sipped a genever – whether within a Negroni or otherwise – there is a good chance that it would have been made in one way or another by Graanstokerij Filliers, the largest genever house in Belgium, the country's first whisky distillery, and the single most important grain distillery you have probably never heard of.

Filliers Distillery in East Flanders of Belgium is run by a family that has been distilling with copper stills on the same plot of land since the 1860s. The family began as farmers in the rich loamy floodplain of the Lys River (also known as the Gouden Rivier in Flemish or Rivière d'Orin French) where the river slows to a meander and where, by tradition, flax stems were once left to ret in the water, giving the river its golden hue and its local nickname. From this same retting tradition Belgium's linen industry was born, and that gold would later be borrowed as a brand name.

What was the distillery in the 1900s.

While Karel Loedwijk Fillers bought some land to farm grain, his brother Ferdinand Bernard Filliers first began running a small agricultural distillery nearby – the kind of seasonal winter operation that was utterly typical in late-nineteenth-century Belgium, where it’s estimated that some 1,000 operations existed in the late by the late 19^th century where farmers would convert perishable grain into something durable and high-value. After his uncle’s distillery was unfortunately destroyed by fire, Ferdinand's nephew Kamiel Filliers continued the family tradition with his own genever distillery sometime in the year 1880 – installing a steam engine to professionalise what had been a hand-fired farm operation. Filliers itself counts this year as its founding.

During the interceding years, the third generation, Firmin Filliers, took the company through some of the most difficult years of World War I and World War II, and pioneered decisions that remain part of the brand identity today. Firmin developed what is widely accepted as the first-ever Belgian gin recipe in 1928, working with his own grain spirit and a sourced selection of 28 botanicals (the number was both his code for "1928" and his recipe-count). It would not be marketed commercially under the Filliers name until 2010 – but the recipe was stowed away in the family archive.

The second was aesthetic: Firmin's signet ring, engraved with the doubled “FF” he used to seal correspondence, was used in all his product labels of the time and became the basis of the modern Filliers logotype.

The Second World War almost ended the story. The Filliers workforce, on the approach of the German army, dismantled the copper still and threw it into the Rekkelinge – a small side-branch of the Lys – to keep its metal from being seized. The trick did not entirely work: the Germans still found parts of the stills, and after the war the family had to invest in new copper. The episode produced two pieces of branding currency still in use. The original site of the stills became listed as Belgian architectural heritage and in 1996 a Filliers copper distilling column was reconstructed on site as a monument. In 2016 the rye whisky Filliers chose to launch was named, with self-aware dryness, “Sunken Still.”

The post-war fourth generation, brothers Louis and Carlos Filliers, pivoted the company decisively toward genever and refined aged spirits as branded products, and opened them to broader Belgian retail trade. And in the late 1960s they began the cask-aging experiments that would mature into Filliers's enormous stock of aged grain spirit that could fuel the present-day whisky programme.

In the 1970s a liqueur produced as a side note turned into a sleeper hit. Julia Denecker, the widow of Firmin Filliers, had a recipe for advocaat – the rich Dutch-Belgian egg-yolk liqueur – built around the abundant eggs from the still-functioning farm. In 1970 Filliers commercialised it.

Filliers Advocaat became, and remains, one of the company's most popular domestic product – the liqueur gets mixed into coffee at Christmas, thinned with lemonade for the relatives who won't touch genever, and poured without ceremony or attribution at a thousand East Flemish kitchen tables. If you've ever been served a cocktail at a Christmas table in this region, there is a real chance you have drunk Julia Denecker’s recipe.

The fifth generation arrived in 1980 in the form of two cousins: Jan Filliers and Bernard Filliers. They reorganised the company, professionalised distribution, broadened the range into fruit genevers and cream genevers, and – most importantly for whisky fans – in the late 1990s began the experiments that would lead to the most consequential pivot in the company's history into aged spirits.

It officially began when the Goldlys Grain Whisky was introduced in 2007 – “Goldlys” named after the gold colour and the local nickname for the Lys River. This was hailed as Belgium’s first whisky. This was distilled from a hybrid setup of a column still feeding the old copper alembics, then aged in ex-Bourbon American oak mostly from Jim Beam.

Venturing further into whisky making was an extension of what the Filliers family was already very good at: distilling and aging grain spirit at scale. So in 2018, the company invested in two large Forsyth copper stills. By then, the Forsyths stills sit in what is “three distilleries on one site”: one for traditional genever and the unaged grain distillates, one for the Filliers Dry Gin (on a Holstein column), and the new one with shiny Scottish stills for malt whisky.

In the following year came Filliers’ first Belgian Single Malt. This was a different proposition from the earlier and admittedly more experimental Goldlys Whisky. Where Goldlys had been a column-and-pot grain whisky, this was a 10-year-old single malt matured exclusively in first-fill European-oak Oloroso sherry casks, and double-distilled the same way international single malts are produced.

The effort paid off. The Filliers 10 Year Old won Gold for Best Belgian Single Malt at the World Whiskies Awards 2022. In October 2024, sixth-generation Benoit Filliers and just-installed distillery director released the Filliers 15 Year Old and the Filliers PX Cask Strength 58.5%. This was followed by the first release of the extra-premium “Family Reserve” edition, a 29 Year Old single cask single grain – a 34 Year Old was eventually released and at the time of writing, it is Belgium's oldest whisky.

The strategic shape of all this appears clear to observers. Filliers was obviously looking to balance the waning popularity of traditional genever with premium whisky. That being suggested, genever still remains the bulk of what Filliers produces, with whisky making up only 7% of its sales.

Almost everything produced by Filliers is produced within one walkable site. Belgian malted barley from Belgomalt is delivered to the back of the property. From there, depending on the recipe, the grain enters one of three production streams.

For Filliers Single Malts, the grain bill consists of pure malted barley, the wash is fermented over a 72-hour cycle, and the spirit is double-distilled in the old copper alembics before the new make spirit goes into casks at 65-70%. It should be noted that the Filliers Single Malts on the market today is not yet from the new Forsyths pot stills (those are in use but their spirit is, as of 2026, still too young to dominate the range).

For genever, grain and rye whiskies, they are interestingly made with unfiltered wash (with grains still within them) that are directly fed into steam-heated column stills. After the low wines emerge at around 25–26% ABV, they receive a second distillation in alembic copper pot stills."

For almost a century at Filliers Distillery, well into 1975, the integration of distilling and farming was total. Long before “regenerative farming” became a hashtag, it was a distillery with a complete ecological cycle, where spent grain from distillation was used as cattle feed and the cattle's manure in turn used fertilised the land. Filliers was running a closed loop because this made full economic sense.

Today, the Filliers family no longer tend to a farm, but the spent grain goes to a local pig farm that raises the Brasvar breed –an expensive range of Belgian pork that somehow holds it structure during cooking and is highly favoured by artisanal butchers and Michelin-starred chefs in Europe. Filliers’s modern closed-loop pattern remains rooted in the actual nineteenth-century farm cycle the family ran for a hundred years.

Filliers has been investing heavily in Sherry casks – particularly first-fill European oak Oloroso Sherry casks. That said, the older range of Family Reserve whiskies appear to be aged in less active American oak casks while the recent Filliers Pedro Ximinez (PX) Cask Strength expression appear to be an attempt to broaden the wood programme.

What of the climate? Filliers is located in the Bachte-Maria-Leerne village that sits along the Lys River. The temperature range is just slightly warmer than Scotland’s Speyside and similar to the Scottish Lowlands. The key difference is that the river introduces some humidity – a floodplain warehouse in a low-lying river valley will be consistently humid all year-round, unlike the cool and relatively dry inland of Scotland. This humid, temperate, river-modulated micro-climate tends to produce a gentler, more gradual extraction from the wood.

Filliers's main maturation room currently holds 5,000 barrels, which it boasts as “one of the largest maturation capacities in Belgium, the Netherlands & Luxembourg" That stock includes both its whisky and aged genever casks laid down since the 1960s – including the oldest stocks of aged genever in the world.

Today, the distillery runs at the scale and depth of a major Speyside distillery while being entirely family-owned and built on a continuous, locally rooted grain-distilling culture that long predates Scotch whisky's global supremacy – even supplying raw malt spirit to its competitors.

Domestically and regionally, many of Filliers' products have become culturally ubiquitous and indispensable in bars and at festive dinner tables, with Filliers’ genevers being widely regarded as the national drink of Belgium since the early 20^th century.

It is, ultimately, the story of how the same Flemish farm family turned itself into an indispensable European spirits institution by doing grain distillation incredibly well, for an extremely long time on that same patch of riverbank. From the family’s agricultural roots in the 1860s, to when the family hid its copper stills from Nazis, up till the working mornings of 2026 when the sixth generation director Benoit Filliers could walk down to the warehouses to sample his great-grandfather's casks – the same river is still there.

Aged Genever Review: Filliers 12 Years Old Barrel Aged Genever, 42% ABV

Tasting Notes 

Appearance: Light caramel.

Nose:Rich and grain-sweet up front, malt and cereal depths with some rye spice stepping forward and a soft floral lift sitting over the top. Slight syrupy note of caramel and honey with a gentle orchard sweetness, a little orange peel, and a thread of vanilla. Slightly savoury herbs and clean pine needles, juniper, a twist of black pepper and gentle baking spices rounding it off. Nicely composed, soft-edged, never sharp.

Palate: A lovely oily, mouth-coating texture. Spiced malt driving the middle, generously creamy, carrying a stripe of cooling mint along with some liquorice. Some soft fudge tones around the edges, Demerara sugar, and a mild oak grip that frames rather than dominates. Faint juniper and orange-peel brightness in the back palate.

Finish: Medium length and led by sweet liquorice and honey, more green grassy and herbal tones coming in late and a pleasant lingering herbaceous bitterness.

My Thoughts:

This makes the case for aged genever as a category that deserves more attention. It has far more going on than the average bourbon-cask Scotch of its age – layering grain, spices, mint, liquorice, juniper and oak into something quite complex and textural. We tried this with some soda and it makes a more memorable highball than a regular bourbon cask Scotch with the way the sweet fruits, savoury herbs and pine-and-liquorice character come together.

@CharsiuCharlie