De Nolet: The Giant of Schiedam and the Tallest Windmills on Earth
Approach Schiedam from the water or the motorway and one silhouette dominates everything: a slender, pale mill tower rising roughly 43 metres to its cap, its four sails sweeping high above the rooftops of a city that already holds the world record for windmill height. This is De Nolet, completed in the mid-2000s on the grounds of the Nolet Distillery, the family firm behind Ketel One vodka. It looks like an oversized cousin of the historic stage mills that surround it, yet inside there are no millstones at all. De Nolet is a wind turbine dressed in the timeless clothing of a Dutch windmill, and its story only makes sense once you understand the extraordinary city it stands in.
A city that ran on grain and genever
Schiedam, wedged between Rotterdam and the river banks of the Nieuwe Maas, was for two centuries one of the great spirits capitals of Europe. From the seventeenth century onwards the town threw itself into the production of genever, the juniper-flavoured grain spirit that is the ancestor of gin. Hundreds of distilleries, known locally as branderijen, crowded along its canals, together with maltings, warehouses and cooperages. All of that industry shared one insatiable appetite: milled grain. Barley and rye had to be ground before they could be malted, mashed and distilled, and in the age before steam the only serious source of power was the wind. Schiedam therefore built mills the way other cities built churches, and at the industry's height around twenty of them worked within the town. The mills were not a picturesque sideline; they were the engine room of the entire local economy, running day and night whenever the wind allowed.
Why Schiedam's mills became the tallest in the world
The famous height of Schiedam's mills was born of necessity, not vanity. The branderijen and their warehouses grew ever taller along the canals, and the town's built-up fabric stole the wind from any ordinary mill. The answer was the stellingmolen, or stage mill: a brick tower tall enough to lift its sails clear of the surrounding roofs, with a wooden gallery running around the tower high above the street. From that stage the miller could set the sails, apply the brake and turn the cap toward the wind without ever descending to ground level. Schiedam pushed this design further than anyone else. Its surviving giants stand more than 33 metres tall to the cap, which makes them the tallest classic windmills anywhere in the world. Standing at the foot of one, you feel the scale immediately: the doorway is dwarfed by a tower that tapers upward like a lighthouse, and the sails begin where the roofline of a modern apartment block would end.
The surviving giants: five historic mills and a reborn camel
Of the roughly twenty mills that once worked in Schiedam, five historic giants still stand along the old town's canals and ramparts. De Drie Koornbloemen, the Three Cornflowers, is the elder of the group, dating from 1770. De Vrijheid, the Freedom, followed in 1785, and De Walvisch, the Whale, was raised in 1794, its name a nod to the town's earlier whaling ventures. De Noord, the North, completed in 1803, ranks among the very tallest of them all. The Palmboom, the Palm Tree, was lost in the twentieth century but rebuilt on its old foundations as a museum mill, where visitors can follow the grain from sack to millstone. A sixth giant, De Kameel, the Camel, vanished in the nineteenth century and was reconstructed from scratch in the twenty-first, proof that Schiedam still takes its mills seriously enough to build them anew. Several of these towers still grind grain, and one has long housed a restaurant in its base.
Enter De Nolet: a new giant for an old skyline
By the early 2000s the Nolet family had been distilling in Schiedam for more than three centuries; the firm traces its founding to 1691. Its modern success story is Ketel One vodka, named after the distillery's original coal-fired pot still, Distilleerketel number one. When the company decided to invest in renewable energy for its plant, it faced a choice any engineer would recognise: erect a standard steel wind turbine, efficient but visually alien, or attempt something no one had done at this scale. The Nolets chose the second path. They commissioned a structure in the full architectural language of a Schiedam stage mill, tower, cap, gallery and four lattice sails, but built to overtop even the historic record holders. Rising roughly 43 metres to the cap, De Nolet deliberately continues the city's oldest tradition: when Schiedam needs power, it builds the tallest windmill it can.
A turbine in a miller's coat
The genius of De Nolet lies in what it conceals. A classic mill transmits the rotation of its sails through a wooden brake wheel and upright shaft down to millstones; De Nolet channels that same rotation into a generator, feeding electricity to the distillery next door. The sails are engineered in modern materials and managed with modern control systems, so the mill can respond to the wind without a miller climbing the stage at dawn. The concrete tower conceals modern floors rather than grain lofts, and the distillery uses the building for receptions and tastings as well as for power. Purists sometimes hesitate to call it a windmill at all, and the debate is a fair one, but it echoes history more than it breaks it. Dutch mills were never romantic ornaments; they were the most advanced power machines of their day, constantly rebuilt with the best available technology. A mill that generates electricity for a grain distillery is arguably the most honest continuation of that lineage imaginable.
What De Nolet says about heritage
De Nolet has become a case study quoted far beyond the Netherlands whenever people discuss how living industries should relate to their own history. It makes a subtle argument: heritage is not only about preserving old fabric, but about keeping a formal language alive by trusting it with new work. The historic giants of Schiedam were saved by restoration societies and volunteer millers; De Nolet was created by a commercial company that could have bought green electricity anonymously from the grid. Instead it spent real money to make its sustainability visible, legible and local, in a shape every resident of Schiedam instantly understands. The result is a skyline where eighteenth-century towers and a twenty-first-century one hold a single conversation about wind, grain and spirit. Few industrial landscapes anywhere manage that continuity, and none does it at such a height.
Planning a visit among the giants
Schiedam rewards a slow day on foot. The historic mills stand close together along the Noordvest and the old canal ring, so you can walk from tower to tower in minutes, watching how each one addresses the water, the wind and the street differently. The museum mill explains the milling process itself, several mills still sell freshly ground flour, and the city's genever museum ties the whole story back to the spirit that paid for it all. De Nolet itself stands on working distillery grounds, so views from the street and the waterside are the everyday way to experience it, with the sails turning silently above the plant it powers. Come on a windy day if you can: the whole point of this city is what happens when the sails are moving.
Explore on the map
The giants of Schiedam are only one cluster among thousands of mills and historic windmill sites you can browse on our interactive map. Zoom in on the Dutch delta to see how dense the milling landscape around Rotterdam really is, then compare Schiedam's record-breaking towers with the drainage mills of Kinderdijk just upstream. Every marker links to details on type, purpose and history, so you can plan your own route from the tallest classic windmills on Earth to their boldest modern descendant.