{"id":1144,"date":"2026-11-07T14:28:55","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T13:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/?p=1144"},"modified":"2026-11-07T14:28:55","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T13:28:55","slug":"the-divine-fluid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/?p=1144","title":{"rendered":"The Divine Fluid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back around mid 1988, during the growing days of ST NEWS<\/strong> disk magazine, my friend Stefan Posthuma and myself were exposed to Plantiac for the first time.\u00a0Vieux<\/em> is what the Dutch call it,\u00a0Dutch brandy<\/em> is what people elsewhere call it. Basically, knock-off\u00a0Cognac<\/em>. It wasn’t too expensive, it tasted good, and it got us pleasantly drunk without too much of a hangover. I was 20 and I suppose Stefan was 21, so around this time getting drunk was a perfectly valid ambition to accompany our usual weekends of disk magazine wrap-ups.<\/p>\n

Whenever something peaked our interest, we really went for it full-tilt. When we ate at a Greek restaurant and happened to be served by a pretty waitress, we’d write odes and go all gaga. When we got a really cool walkman1<\/a><\/sup>A walkman is a very compact device<\/a> that allowed you to play cassette tapes when on the go<\/span> we’d extol at length about how awesome it was. When we discovered Metallica we tried to work many of their lyrics into anything we could. There was nothing better than the Atari ST computer, too. It was on or off – no in-between. None of what we did was half-arsed. We went all-in. Ah, the gushing enthusiasm of youth, right? Be that as it may, Plantiac quickly became one of the things around which our lives, perhaps unhealthily, revolved. We drank it, breathed it (probably literally), practically oozed<\/em> it. We spread the\u00a0Divine Fluid<\/em> gospel wherever we could and, indeed, sought to get to the bottom of where and how it was produced.<\/p>\n

To achieve this last aim, June 1991 saw us visiting the Plantinga distillery in Bolsward. We called it a Pilgrimage<\/em><\/a> and were religiously disappointed when we went there, only to discover Plantiac hadn’t been made there anymore for quite a while. Not so easily deterred, we found out where it was made instead, and managed to make an appointment to visit UTO in Schiedam<\/a>, where Plantiac was actually made. Stefan was unable to attend, but I saw (and smelled<\/em>!) Plantiac being bottled. It was probably one of the highlights of my life – at least until then. That day was 35 years ago today, hence me writing this now. As it turned out, making Plantiac wasn’t quite the process I had expected – it’s just throwing stuff together and it’s instantly finished. Nothing nostalgic, artisinal or otherwise special… but it still tasted great.<\/p>\n

Plantiac continued to be a staple of my alcohol consumption, though as the years wore on I did tone the quantities down. After Stefan moved to Canada there was much less reason for\u00a0ST NEWS<\/strong> finishing bacchanales. However, the ‘Plantiac’ switch in my life was still switched to ‘on’, so July 1998 saw a ‘Plantiac Adoration Shrine<\/a>‘ web site, where pictures of bottles and everything I knew about the drink were collected and chronicled on what I suppose amounted to a ‘fan site’. In March 2000 I registered the plantiac.com domain, which was joined by the even better fitting plantiac.nl domain in January 2012. Not long after that, I also went on the third visit<\/a> to Bolsward to find out more for the site. The month after I visited Bastiaan Plantinga, a direct descendant of the founder of the Plantinga distillery and spritual father of the Plantinga Cognac that later became Plantiac, Klaas Pieter Plantinga<\/a>. Later that year I also added to pages on Wikipedia, for Plantiac<\/a> and the aforementioned K.P. Plantinga.<\/p>\n

Late 2015 was the last time I drank a serious amount of Plantiac: About half a litre. I quickly noticed my body now reacted quite differently to this, certainly when compared to the early 1990s when ST NEWS<\/strong> finishing rituals steadfastly featured such excesses. I had to vomit so intensely that I ended up with a umbilical hernia (Dutch ‘navelbreuk’) that needed to be surgically fixed a year later. Even saying farewell to Plantiac did not go half-cocked, I suppose!<\/p>\n

The current incarnation of the Plantiac site has been a work in progress for the past ten years. Between May and August 2016 I almost entirely revamped it completely using Typo3, a very flexible CMS. I have intended to wrap things up during many past holidays, but I somehow never got around to it. Hopefully this will now happen soon.2<\/a><\/sup>Soon? Yes, because I am at home for a few weeks due to my radical prostatectomy<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Above is my collection of Plantinga-related stuff from April 2020…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>…and here is my current collection3<\/a><\/sup>Sorry for the wobbly pic but iPhone pano is not intended to just photograph a regular wide thing I fear<\/span> (with some other stuff interspersed).<\/p>\n

Of course, as some of you reading this might be students of mine, I would like to emphasize two things:
\n1) Don’t drink alcohol if you have not reached the legal age yet. And even if you have, please “drink met mate”.
\n2) When my Plantiac habit developed, I was young and irresponsible. Right now I am old and much more responsible. The only Plantiac-related thing I do these days is maintaining the Plantiac site<\/a>. My behaviour back in the 90s did not make me a good role model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back around mid 1988, during the growing days of ST NEWS disk magazine, my friend Stefan Posthuma and myself were exposed to Plantiac for the first time.\u00a0Vieux is what the Dutch call it,\u00a0Dutch brandy is what people elsewhere call it. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_unlisted_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,59,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-english","category-plantiac-2","category-st-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1167,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions\/1167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karsmakers.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}