Dutch coffeeshop culture – memories, nostalgia, stories and general discussions

[NotYourSaviour]

Dear members of ICmag,

this thread is about all you ever personally wanted to share about coffeeshop culture apart from recent reviews: first visit, stories, memories and all that either from the past, present or future. What did you impress the most? Who did you meet? Or what ever you associate with them.

Stuff you really liked or indeed not.

No matter where in the Netherlands it happened, just post it.

It seems people have something to say about them and this could be a lovely collection of memories.

Let's go!

 

[Creeperpark]

Dear members of ICmag,

this thread is about all you ever personally wanted to share about coffeeshop culture apart from recent reviews: first visit, stories, memories and all that either from the past, present or future. What did you impress the most? Who did you meet? Or what ever you associate with them.

Stuff you really liked or indeed not.

No matter where in the Netherlands it happened, just post it.

It seems people have something to say about them and this could be a lovely collection of memories.

Let's go!

Thanks for the post friend.

 

[willydread]

Good post!
The only time I've been to Amsterdam was for the New Year's holidays between 2004 and 2005, the city was crazy and full of absurd people, and in a few days so many things happened that I should write a poem....
As for coffeeshops, we toured the most famous ones of the time,but also the littles and unknown, with a delicious hashish pakistani, northern indian and nepali for good prices (Overall the stuff was cheaper than street prices in my country),i remember Nepal hashish with the balsamic scent of menthol, very cerebral, to the Parvati that smelled of honey and flowers...
That must have been the year of Bubblegum, because it was everywhere, you could smell it on the street, and while I found some strains milder than I remembered (superskunk or white widow)many were skunk or powerplant by other names, others were just devastating, i remember destroying my reputation as a heavy smoker with a spliff of ssh,but also kalimist or orange were very powerful ;one my friend went down on the street after overdoing it with ice...

 

[willydread]

I forgot the girls! The girls in the red light districts were beautiful (not all of them to be honest, some were really ugly, but tastes are tastes); at the Grasshopper coffee shop we met two very beautiful girls, one was Italian, we smoked a bit together and chatted, before leaving they suggested we (me and a friend) go visit them and they would give us a "discount" because we were "kind and nice, without prejudices", at the time I was a young Rastafari with quite rigid ideas and I didn't go, my friend did....
Apart from that, the most touristic part itself was quite dirty (some areas were much cleaner and really nice), however the people were absurd: a black guy with a bodybuilder was walking around the street on roller skates wearing a tight tracksuit and a neon pink tutu (at the end of December!), a drugged-out taxi driver was racing in his car through the narrow streets offering us coke without looking too much at the road, on New Year's Eve the families who were celebrating in the square with techno music, the usual ones who fell into the canal, and then many other things are no longer so clear in the memory LoL
Finally, when I got to the airport, while I was waiting for my suitcase, I cuddled a big, furry and playful dog for a while, before I noticed the man in uniform holding the leash! Luckily I was clean and the agent was in a good mood, as he laughed and made a couple of jokes about my holiday....(my friends wasn't very happy because his bag was full of seeds, but all is gone good)
Crazy days...

 

[Sanjuro]

i remember destroying my reputation as a heavy smoker with a spliff of ssh,

I had ssh from Greenhouse cs around 2006-2007 and it was fucking brutal

 

[willydread]

I don't remember being at the greenhouse (that doesn't necessarily mean I haven't been there, just i don't remember many things of this holiday LOL), I don't know the names of many Coffee, I remember going to a coffee shop that had a huge bud under a glass bell jar, they had Mexican Haze on the menu, but it was sold out at the time... I remember getting some other hazes and getting really high walking around the canals and squares of the city....

 

[RizlaMan]

I lived in Maastricht for half a year in 2001. I was fortunate to befriend some locals and get turned onto A5 Haze, though in that circle it was referred to as A2. Fantasia and Club 69 were my favorite coffee shops and Organic Earth was, and still is, a grow shop there selling quality seeds. Bubble Gum, NL x Haze, California Orange Bud, and Blueberry were regularly on coffee shop menus. I returned across the Atlantic with 200 seeds hidden inside emptied Tylenol capsules stored among capsules in their bottle, grow books, and opened eyes.

 

[BuenaLaRata]

I spent a few days there in 2008 and 2009. I found Amsterdam to be a magical place, even (or precisely hahah) because the main reason I went there was to get high, back when smoking weed was still a key element of my lifestyle and identity. The first bud I smoked in the next best coffeeshop near my hotel (which was called “Flipper” and which apparently still exists) was Super Silver Haze and it was phenomenal. My friend and I went through a shit ton coffeeshops and strains. The one that stuck in my mind was the “Tweede Kamer”, where I smoked White Russian through a bong (secretly mixing it with tobacco according to my habits even if there was a tobacco ban).

The Power Plant at the Jolly Joker coffee shop was also one of my highlights, although it was considered a standard strain that you could get in any coffee shop.
Somewhere I bought some outdoor weed that was supposedly from Jamaica. It was one of the best I've ever had. Unfortunately forget which coffee shop it was, but it was a rather "underground" place.

My friend went to the hookers while I was chilling in the hotel because it's not my style to pay for sex. He had some kind of massage and then realized that his wallet was gone when he put his clothes back on. He begged them to at least give him back his ID card, driving license etc. because it was of no use for them anyway, and they actually did it lol.

On the first trip, we ended up being so messed up that we got to the airport too late to check in and had to take a train back to southern Germany, which was twice as expensive as the damn flight and took around 10 hours


€: Just found some pics that made it through until today

 

[aCBD]

The best memories of coffeeshops is me coming from a small village, exploring the wide range of strains available in Amsterdam during my early-mid 20's. At my first ever visit i was thinking that my tolerance was high, outsmoking everybody at home with the mids we had. Little did i know..
After i had a small breakfast at my stay i enjoyed a beautiful morning and went to the Tweede Kamer after a small walk. I grabbed some of their AK-47 and Kali Mist. I can't remember which one i smoked first but i wanted a strong Sativa. I enjoyed my first joint with a cup of hot coffee or cacao and felt the high.
After the first joint i smoked a second one with the other variety and because i was young and dumb i ordered a cold drink because i felt that something is creeping up inside of me. I got hot flashes but didn't want to only smoke half a joint because of my false young pride. After i finished the second joint and another cold drink, i couldn't handle to sit in the smoke anymore. I had heat flushes, felt shaky and had to get some fresh air i thought. As soon as i entered the outside i got hit with a hammer, my stomach couldn't handle the acidity of the drinks anymore and i walked to a tree next to the gracht to throw up. I felt awful like a bloody tourist but i was also soo high and paralyzed that i had to walk back to my hotel to take a nap and restart the day again, just a few hours later.
I still have the small notebooks with my ratings of the shops and all the different weed and hash varieties i smoked. Helped me a lot in figuring out what i wanted to grow but that's for another time..

 

[Sanjuro]

but didn't want to only smoke half a joint because of my false young pride.

Hah hah i know how that one feels

Not a coffeeshop story

It wasn’t pride for me but my first joint of pure marijuana in roskilde. Back home it was just little bit of mids maroc and afghan hash mixed with tobacco, wasn’t much of a smoker either back then cause you wouldn’t get it in my circles that often but i sure liked getting high when i could

white widow, rolled a nice pure joint,0,5-0,7grams, more than regular marlboro cigarettes worth, it was so soft on the lungs compared to the tobacco and hash. You barely felt it when inhaling. Well soft isn’t the same as weak right. Who new. hah hah

my buddy had enough after 2-3 rounds but i thought i’d finish the other half of the joint by myself cause the smoke felt so nice and soft. It had creeper effect too so it didn’t hit you with full force right away, so putting it out and finishing it later didn’t even cross my mind. Finished it and laid down on my side of the tent

And then it hit me! Boy were we high. fucked up is the suitable term here. I felt every lump of that camping ground under our tent. i probably spent an hour trying to find a spot where every lump of the ground wasn’t trying to drill into my body hah hah.

My buddy was still freaking out in the morning “we have to throw that away! that’s not weed there’s something else in it” I said no after thinking about it but we sure did roll much smaller joints with tobacco mixed in after that

 

[aCBD]

Another time i went to the Amnesia coffeeshop which is very popular for a lot of reasons. They had a Volcano vaporizer there and also the bags for it which you can fill up and inhale. So i talked with the budtender and asked what strain he can recommend for a sativa up-high. He said "You will taste what you smell." He filled up a Volcano bag for me and he was absolutely right. The taste was exactly how the weed smelled like and i couldn't resist inhaling because of the taste and because i was expecting to get hit by the high. Taste was great but not the high i expected and didn't even bother to write down what i smoked. It was and experience and i left the coffeeshop and looked on the map which one would be my next choice.
The shop of choice was Biba so i walked to there. Being disappointed by the Volcano experience i ordered Haze because i read about it but never really experienced it. The smoke was great, the chat with the budtender too. Was waiting to get hit by a psychedelic high but I felt very comfortable and smoked the whole Haze i bought while enjoying coffee and chats. Just because it was so comfy, i felt like buying Shiva and Northern Lights. That shop was awesome, friendly locals coming in and chatting and me just enjoying the smokes. Something strange was going on since i was smoking like crazy and the budtender already finished her shift and another budtender is joining me with my chats. I still felt like home and because i ran out of weed again i switched to Hashish and got some 00 and Ketama. It got dark outside, the boss of the coffeeshop came in with a used shopping bag and they went to the back, chatting and packaging. When they came back i finished with the Hash and asked for AK-47 and White Widow. The boss was amused and asked me how i can smoke so much but i didn't know. I was asking myself the same. When even the locals are wondering, something is going on. After a final joint i said goodbye and left this comfy place that felt like home to get some food.
Very late i realized it.. I didn't connect the Volcano plus the Haze. Maybe it was both maybe just the Haze but nothing was able to cut through the high of it and i didn't realize it.
Was looking for psychedelic Haze but got something amazing, highly electrical. This was my first real Haze experience. The second time was Neville Haze and me walking around Amsterdam for hours but that's another story

 

[Gunter]

a drugged-out taxi driver was racing in his car through the narrow streets offering us coke without looking too much at the road

I was arriving at the main station maybe in 2018 late at night on very badly planned trip to Amsterdam once and I could not figure out the bus schedule.
So I took the first best taxi and was scared of my life for the first time in a taxi. Not sure if the guy was drunk or something, "interesting driving" but we made it to my hotel.

The whole trip was planned and booked on my phone while sitting in a cinema, the next day the journey started.

The whole coffee shop scene at that time seemed like it had seen better days. I don't know everything a bit worn out, like going to shabby bars in dailight. Not that much going on, rainy.
I tried to find some real shops, some neighborhood type of shops, legendary and old shops. I talked to some older Americans who told my how it was coming to Amsterdam in the 1970s. In that way the trip was kind of nice.

I am glad that I could also go in the early 2000s too when places like the dampkring etc had their best times.
Believe it or not the first trip was a school trip where the teacher just let us go on our own.

 

[Sativied]

Nice thread. After 32 years of coffeeshops, and working at one for a couple of years, I got enough stories to fill book.

Let’s start with ‘tablefootballtables’, foosball in proper English. Or German.

After getting bored with pooltables and being a pinballwizard with no real competition I figured I try some foosball. Most of the better shops in town (which wasn’t Amsterdam) had a foosball table. Some had a cheap toy version, most had a real Deutscher Meister. The favorite was the white one. No hash or weed menu could make up for the lack of a Deutscher Meister.

We usually played 2vs2 and it didn’t take long for me to become good enough for people to challenge me. All day long, 7 days a week. I didn’t always have a great partner so I needed to play at 150% at least. Usually, me getting the ball meant me scoring. My hand-eye coordination, ball control, passing back and forth and sideways, I was in my own league for at least a year. I’d sometimes play with one hand/bar to keep it fair, or simply play alone vs two.

My secret was getting in the zone, I was always high af, to a point where I played on auto-pilot. It was glorious. Not like one strain was better than the other, just needed to reach that equilibrium between being high af but not fucked up.

There was another place than coffeeshops where foosball was a thing: prison. What’s the first thing do you do when you get out of prison? You go to a coffeeshop and roll a fat one. I was 19 at the time, worked at the shop, and this 30-something guy walks in. Neck-tattoo, mean-looking fella. We were still just kids (this was early 90s), we didn’t care for authorities and all had our dealings with cops, but this guy was different, coked-up trouble. After he ordered, my girlfriend tells me she knows the guy, lived in the same neighborhood. He was doing time for kicking his buddy into a hospital over a coke - dispute and was probably out on parole.

As usual, some regulars challenge me to a match of foosball, and as usual I do my thing. After my glorious victory the convict stands up and asks me if I’m up for a 1vs1. Needless to say I accept. Even if I had known what I shortly after learned I would have accepted. My reputation was on the line, it wasn’t my shop but I had the keys, I was the master of both the stash and the expresso machine. He was in my house.

I wasn’t going to hold back, but I kinda did, at first. I drop the ball and let him have it. *Tick tick bang!*. 0-1. There was nothing I could do. Even when I had the ball he seemed to know where I was going to hit it. None of my moves, my lightning-speed, my unexpected long shots from behind, nothing worked. His keeper was always there and shortly after there was always the bang sound, on my side.

I didn’t score a single goal and for a brief moment lost my cool, responded like Alcaraz (the young grand slam winner). The guy smiles at my frustration, first time that happened. He compliments me (I didn’t score a single point) and passes his joint. I laughed at myself, declined, and gave him mine instead. He was smoking NL or orange bud maybe, I was smoking super pollem. The super pollem the owner made me keep in my pants near my balls so it would remain soft and easy to cut. The real good Morrocan stuff. I tell him to keep that cause he deserved it.

He returned a few times to order the good stuff and then I ran into him on the streets a week later. He told me he had to go back, pretty much dumped his life story on me and then said goodbye and “good game”.

I played foosball only once after that. About 6-7 years later. In a shop in Amsterdam. Original Bulldog basement. My younger brother started smoking weed and wanted to go with me to Amsterdam. He had no knowledge of where I’d been and worked (he was still living at my parents). Two tourist asked us to join in on a game of foosball. My brother is reluctant, he played enough to know the rules but that’s about it. I look at the table, I see a deutscher meister, I smiled and said that’s ok. It was almost like riding a bicycle. A little rusty the first 30 seconds but they didn’t have a chance, they had no idea one could play foosball like that.

Sometimes I walk into a shop with a deutscher meister, spin the bar (against the rules) to trigger some flashbacks.

 

[WyattHerbShiwa]

My first visit to a coffeeshop was to the YANKS in Zandvoort in 1993.
They had a Piano - which housed like 14 rows of plastic boxes for 24 guilders each.
The sortiment was amazing. Like 10 kinds of weed and 5 kinds of hash.

Orange Bud, Purple (dutch outdoor/greenhouse), Skunk, Superskunk, Durban, imported african
and of course moroccan hash from cheap to premium.

Lovely koffje, and Toastykaas.
It was very cozy and patient with customers - nowadays not so much.
Jeez, i am old.

 

[WyattHerbShiwa]

Nice thread. After 32 years of coffeeshops, and working at one for a couple of years, I got enough stories to fill book.

Let’s start with ‘tablefootballtables’, foosball in proper English. Or German.

After getting bored with pooltables and being a pinballwizard with no real competition I figured I try some foosball. Most of the better shops in town (which wasn’t Amsterdam) had a foosball table. Some had a cheap toy version, most had a real Deutscher Meister. The favorite was the white one. No hash or weed menu could make up for the lack of a Deutscher Meister.

We usually played 2vs2 and it didn’t take long for me to become good enough for people to challenge me. All day long, 7 days a week. I didn’t always have a great partner so I needed to play at 150% at least. Usually, me getting the ball meant me scoring. My hand-eye coordination, ball control, passing back and forth and sideways, I was in my own league for at least a year. I’d sometimes play with one hand/bar to keep it fair, or simply play alone vs two.

My secret was getting in the zone, I was always high af, to a point where I played on auto-pilot. It was glorious. Not like one strain was better than the other, just needed to reach that equilibrium between being high af but not fucked up.

There was another place than coffeeshops where foosball was a thing: prison. What’s the first thing do you do when you get out of prison? You go to a coffeeshop and roll a fat one. I was 19 at the time, worked at the shop, and this 30-something guy walks in. Neck-tattoo, mean-looking fella. We were still just kids (this was early 90s), we didn’t care for authorities and all had our dealings with cops, but this guy was different, coked-up trouble. After he ordered, my girlfriend tells me she knows the guy, lived in the same neighborhood. He was doing time for kicking his buddy into a hospital over a coke - dispute and was probably out on parole.

As usual, some regulars challenge me to a match of foosball, and as usual I do my thing. After my glorious victory the convict stands up and asks me if I’m up for a 1vs1. Needless to say I accept. Even if I had known what I shortly after learned I would have accepted. My reputation was on the line, it wasn’t my shop but I had the keys, I was the master of both the stash and the expresso machine. He was in my house.

I wasn’t going to hold back, but I kinda did, at first. I drop the ball and let him have it. *Tick tick bang!*. 0-1. There was nothing I could do. Even when I had the ball he seemed to know where I was going to hit it. None of my moves, my lightning-speed, my unexpected long shots from behind, nothing worked. His keeper was always there and shortly after there was always the bang sound, on my side.

I didn’t score a single goal and for a brief moment lost my cool, responded like Alcaraz (the young grand slam winner). The guy smiles at my frustration, first time that happened. He compliments me (I didn’t score a single point) and passes his joint. I laughed at myself, declined, and gave him mine instead. He was smoking NL or orange bud maybe, I was smoking super pollem. The super pollem the owner made me keep in my pants near my balls so it would remain soft and easy to cut. The real good Morrocan stuff. I tell him to keep that cause he deserved it.

He returned a few times to order the good stuff and then I ran into him on the streets a week later. He told me he had to go back, pretty much dumped his life story on me and then said goodbye and “good game”.

I played foosball only once after that. About 6-7 years later. In a shop in Amsterdam. Original Bulldog basement. My younger brother started smoking weed and wanted to go with me to Amsterdam. He had no knowledge of where I’d been and worked (he was still living at my parents). Two tourist asked us to join in on a game of foosball. My brother is reluctant, he played enough to know the rules but that’s about it. I look at the table, I see a deutscher meister, I smiled and said that’s ok. It was almost like riding a bicycle. A little rusty the first 30 seconds but they didn’t have a chance, they had no idea one could play foosball like that.

Sometimes I walk into a shop with a deutscher meister, spin the bar (against the rules) to trigger some flashbacks.

I have learned to play on a Deutscher Meister Table.
I still play. In a club. we have 20 Leonard Tables nowadays.
On good days i win a game vs. folks who play in the 1st german Bundesliga of Foosball.

 

[Sativied]

Lovely koffje, and Toastykaas.

On man, the tosties… In addition to snickers, mars, twix etc, and aside from coffee and tea (initial often free), shops wanted to offer more to deal with the munchies. Couldn’t get a license to sell food like a restaurant (this made greenhouse restaurant at haarlemmerstraat an odd but beautiful thing by itself) , but a tosti iron was ‘gedoogd’ (like the whole cannabis scene, unofficially decriminalized) and about as standard as a foosball table. Two slices of bread, cheese (and possibly ham), few minutes in the tosti iron… some ketchup… nom nom nom. I think maybe there’s one in my area that still serves tostis on a paper plate.

 

[WyattHerbShiwa]

we germans would always end our camping trip with - after packing up - spending our guilders change on Koffje and Tostis before the drive home.

 

[Sativied]

we germans would always end our camping trip with - after packing up - spending our guilders change on Koffje and Tostis before the drive home.

If you’re close to the border, visit Moby Dick in Hengelo. Not the best menu but it’s got that oldskool coffeeshop feeling still. Good koffie too. I sometimes go there on my way back from Germany (I shop at Rewe and Kaufland lol).

 

[WyattHerbShiwa]

If you’re close to the border, visit Moby Dick in Hengelo. Not the best menu but it’s got that oldskool coffeeshop feeling still. Good koffie too. I sometimes go there on my way back from Germany (I shop at Rewe and Kaufland lol).

I dont go to Coffeeshops anymore. Old fart, scared to not get home after trying out some monster weed.
Last time i was in Zandvoort i bought prerolled Super Polm Joints. Those were lovely instead of cigarettes.

 

[Antoine Mack]

My best coffeeshop story didn't even really happened at a coffeeshop but at the dutch/german border more or less.

I live near the Netherlands so for me and other stoners here it is totally normal in your youth to not have a guy here where you get your stuff from, but to just take the bike, train or automobile to the next coffeeshop right behind the border.

At times (early 2000's for instance) there was so much smuggling traffic and so many young guys on their way over the border misbehaved so bad (littering, peeing where you shouldn't etc) and the people who lived near the border were so bothered that the border police started to harrass the coffeeshop customers with stops and searches even on their way to the Netherlands, when they haven't even been able to do something illegal yet.

There was a time when i used to walk to the shop as well in order to save some money on the train ride.
You used to have to get an additional train ticket to cross the border, but when you rode the train just to the last station on the german side, it was only half an hour walk to the next shop and just shy of an hour to the better shop within the city center of this town the journey is heading, called Venlo.

So me and a couple of friends of mine did the train-walk-thing (taking the train to Kaldenkirchen and walking the rest to Venlo) and came across an unmarked car near the border, two people got out, walked up to us and identified themselves as cops.
Of course they knew what we were doing there. Although we tried to bullshit them just for fun and had a couple of laughs too, telling them we were out to buy cheese and coffee and all the stuff old folks travel to Venlo for unnecessarily. The cops were not so happy. We didn't take any of that stuff serious back then.


Anyway, they searched us and confiscated our coffeeshop customer cards "for the prevention of crimes". You had to be registered as a customer at least at the Nobody's Place back then and there was a simple white magnet strip card you would get from them as your customer identification so to speack.
The cops thought, when they take our cards, we will not be able anymore to buy weed at the shops and would just turn around and go home.
They were kind of astonished as we just continued walking towards the border
after they were done with us. Kind of funny after watching them thinking they
had one up one us for talking our cards.
The thing is, the cops didn't know, that you can also just know your customer number and tell it to the budtender at the shop or have your id with your name on it which you have to have aynway when you cross a border. Then you can buy as usual and get a new card for just 5 Euros. No problem there.

So, prevention of crimes was the reason why they bothered us and took away our cards.

Funnily our plan consistited of the visit of two shops that day.
We wanted to buy some hash at the Huzuur and then visit the Nobody's Place,
buy some Weed and chill there for a bit before going back.

(FYI: That would have been two crimes, because the act of buying Cannabis is illegal in Germany and even when you are a german citizen abroad it still technically is.)

But because the thing with the cops took so long, the Nobody's Place was already so overcrowded that we didn't find a place to sit for us three and had to visit a third shop (Klein maar fijn aka Rastaman) to chill and smoke. Obviously we had to buy something there, too, in order to stay and hang out.

So in the end we committed three crimes, although we just wanted to do two, just because the cops tried to prevent us from doing one.

Another thing: The cards were still by law our property and the cops told us, we could come by at the station in the evening and collect our cards.
That was a trap!
They knew damn well that the last train leaves at around 10pm and they told us to come by at 10
or half past nine or something like that.
In any case, the time they told us was just too late to still catch the last train and we would have been forced to walk home for five or six hours. They've also definitely seen that we have no money for a taxi when they searched us earlier.

Of course, we didn't fall for that shit, but just got ourselves new cards from the shop instead.


Ende gut - alles gut.