It starts as medicine, not a drink

The earliest documented ancestor of gin isn't a spirit at all. Around 1245, the Flemish encyclopedist Thomas of Cantimpré described juniper berries boiled in wine or rainwater as a stomach remedy. A few decades later, Jacob van Maerlant repeated the same remedy in Dutch in his Der Naturen Bloeme (c. 1266–1270). Neither text describes distillation — it's an infusion, prescribed for cramps and digestion, centuries before anyone called it genever.

The actual first juniper spirit

The real documentary anchor is later and more specific: a recipe called "Gebrande Wyn te Maken" ("making burned wine"), found in a cookbook from the Arnhem/Apeldoorn region of the Netherlands and dated to around 1495. It's the earliest known recipe for a recreational juniper spirit — not medicine, something people made to drink. Amsterdam was already taxing distilled spirits by 1497, which suggests recreational drinking was underway even before that. The first printed genever-specific recipe followed from an Antwerp physician, Philippus Hermanni, in a distilling manual most commonly dated to 1552. By 1606, Dutch authorities were taxing genever as an ordinary commercial drink, not a medicine.

The doctor who didn't invent it

You'll often see genever credited to Franciscus Sylvius, a 17th-century Leiden physician, around 1650. This is a documented historical error. Sylvius wasn't born until 1614 — genever was already being taxed as a commodity by 1606, before he existed, and it's referenced in an English play from 1623, when he was about nine years old. The claim traces to an 1824 book that misread a much earlier mention of "Sylvius's oily volatile salt" — a medicinal formulation Sylvius genuinely did create, using an already-existing spirit as its base, not evidence he invented that spirit.

From genever to London Dry

English gin descends from genever, but it's a different drink by the time it gets there — filtered through a rougher, more chaotic 17th–18th century English period (the Gin Craze, and the Gin Acts of 1736 and 1751 that tried to rein it in) before settling into something recognizably modern. The lighter, drier style called "London Dry" only became possible after Aeneas Coffey patented a continuous still in 1830, letting distillers make a cleaner, higher-proof spirit than old pot stills allowed — "dry gin" shows up in print by 1833. The popular "English soldiers discovered genever at a siege and brought home Dutch courage" story is worth treating with the same skepticism as the Sylvius myth — the phrase "Dutch courage" itself isn't recorded until 1723, decades after the scene it's supposedly describing.

Ten centuries, one bottle

All of that history — medicine, tax records, botched attribution, a better still — collapses into a single clear spirit on your shelf today. Sakaba's Gin category alone covers 18 free recipes, from the bone-dry Martini to the herbal Southside, if you want to taste where a very long argument ended up.