HEINEKEN
FROM THE AIR
B
A bird's-eye view
of the organisation
Siège social de la société Heineken, en plein
centre d'Amsterdam.
Amid green meadows, near Zoeterwoude,
stands the brewery opened in 1975.
Au milieu des vertes prairies, la brasserie, in-
augurée en 1975, prés de Zoeterwoude.
river deliberately left undisturbed so that the
countryside might be preserved as far as
possible in its original state It is Heineken's
largest establishment in terms of plant area,
but not its largest brewery. This you will find in
the south. Before reaching it you fly above the
small town of Zoetermeer, where a building
site is waiting for Heineken. Soon the first pile
for a new distillery will be driven into the soil.
In two and a half years it will be ready for
production.
And then you come to Rotterdam, where an
empty lot is all that is left of the old Heineken
plant built there in 1873. But Heineken is still
very much part of the scene in this bustling
town, which has the largest harbour in the
world. Two distilleries are in full operation
there, making practically every kind of spirit
and particularly the famous Dutch jenever.
One distillery :s in the heart of the city. The
other is as it were next door to Rotterdam in
the town of Schiedam, where jenever has
been distilled for hundreds of years.
But back we go to Rotterdam, for there is
much more of Heineken there. Next to a block
of large sales offices is a building where the
Head office of the Heineken company, in the
very heart of Amsterdam.
Flying is the best way to get an overall picture
of Heineken in the Netherlands today; and,
ideally, you would need a helicopter.
But when it all began, more than a hundred
years ago, a balloon ascent over Amsterdam
would have been sufficient to give you a
bird's-eye view; you would have been able to
see, right in the centre of the city, a brewery
known as The Haystack. And that's all there
was of the company in 1864, the year when
the founder, G. A. Heineken, then 22, made
his start in the business by buying The Hays
tack, which dated from 1592.
Today a balloon would be quite inadequate. You
would need a kind of spaceship and a giant
pair of binoculars to see Heineken in its enti
rety in the Netherlands - the thousands of
signs carrying the company name in the
streets of the towns and villages; the produc
tion units scattered all over the country.
But, being practical, you take off from
Amsterdam in your helicopter and as you ho
ver above the city your eye is caught by two
breweries not more than a mile apart (No, The
Haystack is not one of them; it has long since
disappeared to make way for an hotel and a
restaurant). The smaller of the two breweries
is the first to have been built by Heineken; it
was erected in 1868 when The Haystack be
came too small to house the rapidly ex
panding business. Heineken chose a spot far
away from city-life and the stone building was
surrounded by the green meadows for which
Holland is so famous.. Today you can hardly
recognize it among the thousands of roofs
which have appeared around it in the last
hundred years.
The other brewery is Amstel, which was also
built in the middle of green pastures and
among black and white spotted cows, but
here also housing has ousted nature. As they
are located in Amsterdam it is no wonder that
both units are situated alongside a canal,
which in the past provided an indispensable
means of transporting beer and its raw mate
rials. Needless to say, trucks have now taken
over.
Flying over the dikes, the canals and the rivers
in a southerly directio'n, you come to the very
large Zoeterwoude brewery near the town of
Leyden between Amsterdam and The Hague.
Its site is so huge covering nearly 200 acres
that you cannot miss it. But not all of the
land has been used for building. Here nature's
green is everywhere and a small river flows
peacefully between the stone structures a
humming of electronic equipment never stops
night or day. Here is the company's computer
centre, where most of the administration is
handled. But the computers not only handle
the bookkeeping, they also work out the best
way to load the hundreds of trucks which are
daily on the road; and they memorize the
stocks to the last bottle, empty or full. The
computers are like so many spiders absorbing
all information concerning Heineken and
storing it for future use, even adding or sub
tracting the sale of one crate of drinks hand
led by one of the many beverage wholesalers
owned by Heineken throughout the country.
It is not, however, a matter only of figures,
sales and spirits in Rotterdam. In an old group
of buildings you will find the firm of Reuchlin,
wine merchants who for 150 years have spe
cialized in quality wines from Europe and who
joined Heineken a few years ago, adding a
new tradition to the many the company
cherishes.
As we continue flying due east the city of
Bois-le-Duc appears, featuring one of the
most impressive cathedrals of the Nether
lands; its spire can be seen from the roof of
Heineken's largest brewery. One and a half
billion glasses of beer, mostly for export, are
produced there every year. It was inaugurated
in 1958 by HRH the Prince of the Netherlands,
and it has expanded continuously ever since.
The last addition was a big office building
opened in early 1976.
Then we head north again and we see how the
many waterways give way to sandy soil, for
Holland is not everywhere the watery country
foreigners believe it to be. And when we hover
over the centre of Bunnik, a very small village
dotted with mountains of crates, we discern
Vrumona, Heineken factory which produces a
variety of soft drinks and, under licence,
Pepsi-Cola and Seven-Up Lorries mingle with
tankers bringing in thousands of gallons of
tomato juice from Naples or fruit juices from
somewhere else on the Mediterranean.
As we continue due north another village at
tracts our attention. It is Hattem, where
Messrs. Van Olffen are located, bottlers and
suppliers of wine to supermarkets and similar
outlets. Rivers of red and white wine flow from
their stockrooms, together with other drinks
such as eggnog.
And then to our final destination, Leeuwar
den, capital of the province of Friesland, the
region famous for its cows. Here we find the
distillery of the Bokma company, makers of
numerous spirits, but specialists in the field of
Dutch jenever, sold in square bottles, one of
6