Freddy Heineken

Alfred “Freddy” Heineken, a brewer and salesman, died on January 3rd 2002, aged 78

Serious beer drinkers will tell you that beers differ from place to place, as wines and cheeses do. That is true, but most people are content to accept whatever beer is available as long as it is pleasant and clean. The world’s most widely drunk beer, made by various brewers, is a mild version of a lager that was created by Czechs in Pilsen in 1842. The one popularised by Freddy Heineken is sniffed at by connoisseurs for, they say, not having a lot of character, but it is difficult to dislike and goes down smoothly. The Dutch firm grew rapidly to become one of the global giants in brewing, its beer selling in some 170 countries, rivalled only in size by Anheuser-Busch and Miller in the United States and Belgium’s Interbrew.

If it had a secret ingredient it was Mr Heineken’s talent as a salesman. During two years in New York as a young man he fell under the spell, as he put it, of American advertising and marketing. It was liberating, especially after the staid world of the Netherlands. Advertising lived on ideas, some of them quite mad ones. That was their appeal. Mr Heineken never rejected an idea simply because it seemed mad. Some of his colleagues thought it a little mad when he proposed to sell Heineken beer overseas in green-glass bottles. Why not brown bottles, the usual containers for beer? Green would be more distinctive, Mr Heineken said. The firm had to sell distinction.

In its green bottle, with “export” on the label, and priced to match its suggestion of exclusivity, it caught on in the United States and elsewhere as a beer for special occasions. People were amused by, and perhaps even believed, its claim to be the beer that “refreshes the parts that other beers cannot reach”. Mr Heineken said he wasn’t really selling beer. “I was selling warmth, gaiety.”

Freddy Heineken’s father was also a clever salesman. He taught Freddy that beer travels well. It is remarkably neutral, with no threatening nationalistic message, no enemies. When in the second world war the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, they were happy to drink Heineken beer. Heineken senior was the first foreign brewer to ship beer to the United States after prohibition ended in 1933. He was also a boozer, and in 1942, possibly under the strain of living in a country under German occupation, he sold most of the family’s shares in the brewery that could trace its roots back to 1592.

In the 1950s, when Freddy succeeded his father on the Heineken board, he borrowed enough money to buy a controlling share. He was chief executive from 1971 to 1989, guiding the company to great prosperity, buying out competitors or taking stakes in them, and becoming the richest man in the Netherlands. He retained the chairmanship of Heineken’s holding group until last November.

It amused him to claim that he was a financial dunce, uninterested in such matters as debt-to-equity ratios. Had his father not floated the company, he said, he would have kept it private. He said he relied on intuition, a sense of the market: more female drinkers, the move to beer among wine drinkers, the demand for low-calorie drinks. In the end a healthy balance sheet and steady profits were what

matter, he said soothingly. Unsoothed financial experts believed the share price should have been higher, and they will be watching for any changes in the company following the death of its guiding light.

He was born Alfred, but the name Freddy stuck from childhood and even Heineken shares are called Freddies. The name seemed to suit his engaging personality, his love of life and his rough sense of humour. A woman journalist he was showing around his Amsterdam headquarters, called the Pentagon, was mildly surprised by a picture in a bedroom next to his office of a naked woman with a cat, entitled The Woman with Two Pussies. The Dutch loved Freddy stories, and he did his best to oblige them. In 1983, after being released from three terrifying weeks in the hands of kidnappers, he joked that he had never been so relieved to see so manypolicemen all at once.

It may be that eventually Freddy Heineken became a little bored with the beer he made famous. He was careful not to say so. For a Dutchman to say he was bored with beer would be akin to knocking Rembrandt. But he did say that had he not been a brewer he would have liked to have made a career in advertising. The “refreshes the parts” campaign was said to be his idea. One of his wilder proposals, never tried, was to sell beer in square bottles. Instead of being thrown away, the “world bottle”, as he called it, could be used as a brick to build homes in poor countries, or even rich ones.

He supported research into saving the ozone layer and was interested in communication with other possible worlds. He set up a foundation to promote the arts. He was sympathetic to the European Union’s aim of ending war by hobbling the old troublemakers. But a better plan, he said, would be to divide up the continent into numerous states – 75, he suggested – each with the same number of inhabitants. Quite mad, said his critics, as though that were a reason for rejecting it.