The current Café 't Smalle served as a tasting room at the time. 

When Hoppe comes to live here, Egelantiersgracht is only a century and a half old. It is in the Jordaan, the district for the common people. The Jordaan, at the time an open sewer, is seen by the neat city dwellers of the main canals as the district of Sodom and Gomorrah, where fornication, death and decay take place.

Various crafts take place here; there is sawing, carpentry, street vendors and shoe shiners praising their wares and skills. It is a coming and going of barges to load and unload, handcarts and squeaky carriages rattling along the paths. All drowned out by the sound of screaming pigs and bellowing cattle being slaughtered in the open.

Every street has a different smell. Wood, metal, clotted blood and flesh, animal skins and rotting fruit meet you. And all the rubbish ends up in the moat, which gives off an overpowering stench. The rich merchants and high lords quenched their thirst in those days with wine and strong liqueurs. The scum had to make do with brandy and beer, all because water was not fit to drink in those days.

Pieter Hoppe is not much into beer, all the more into liqueurs and gin. He was not allowed to make these until he officially became a citizen of the city, a "poorter". In 1804, he finally managed to do so after paying a hefty sum of money and swearing his allegiance to Amsterdam. Hoppe then rapidly bought into the Egelantiersgracht and after a while owned almost the entire even side. Together with a few warehouses on Egelantiersstraat, his distillery and liqueur distillery controlled a considerable area.

His distillery is a true lover's paradise where one gets drunk from the 'spirit of angels', the alcohol-infused air, even without having drunk a single drop.