Biography | Freddy Heineken — The Stadhouderskade Brewery He Ran Until Amsterdam Could No Longer Hold It

The building tourists queue for on Stadhouderskade was a working brewery for 121 years.

Gerard Adriaan Heineken opened it in 1867, three years after he bought the old Haystack brewery elsewhere in the city.

Freddy did not found it.

He joined it as a teenager in 1941, when the family no longer held the shares, and he was chairman of the board from 1971 until 1989.

The company record is blunt about what those years were for: production, sales, the green bottle, and a push that turned a Dutch name into a global one.

He had already bought a controlling position back, quietly, in 1954.

In 1968 Heineken took over Amstel, its Amsterdam rival.

By the late 1980s the Stadhouderskade plant could not meet the volume.

Brewing here stopped in 1988.

The vats went to Zoeterwoude and Den Bosch.

What remains is a rijksmonument and, behind the ticket desk, the Heineken Experience.

Marie Heinekenplein, named for a painter in the family, now occupies part of the old yard.

The offices from which he actually ran the firm sat across the Singelgracht, in Villa Heineken.

This facade is still the place the work smelled of.

Photo: Massimo Catarinella, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons.