Beer Culture

Stories about great beer from the countries that invented it.

Tag: Drinks Union

Heineken Drives On Deep Into the Czech Market

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Heineken announced yesterday that it is taking over the four great brands of the Czech Republic’s Drinks Union brewery group (Zlatopramen, Velké Březno, Louny and Kutná Hora), which have an overall market share of 4%. The takeover will make Heineken the third-largest player in the Czech market after SAB-Miller and InBev, bumping Budvar to fourth place.

It’s not exactly a surprise — news of the proposed sale was floated last autumn — but it still caused ripples across the small pond of the beer world: within a few hours I was contacted by friends at CAMRA about the purchase, and EBCU members apparently all got the message via email. Back here at home, Pivní deník reported the story, posing some interesting questions.

To paraphrase: If Heineken decides to close some of its newly acquired breweries in the name of streamlining and efficiency, who will be the first? Louny, which is closest to Krušovice, which already has plenty of unused brewing capacity? Or Kutná Hora, which Drinks Union doesn’t actually own but only rents from the town? Or one of the twinned breweries of Zlatopramen and Velké Březno? Would two breweries in the same town really survive a takeover by such a major international brewing group?

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Help Wanted: Selling Budvar

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A few months ago, a friend mentioned that when he was just starting out as a young lawyer in the mid-1990s, he did some work at a law firm here in Prague. One of his projects back then was the contract for a possible sale of Budějovický Budvar to Anheuser-Busch.

That sale never went through, of course, and Budvar and Anheuser-Busch maintain a “frenemy” relationship today, entering into distribution deals for Budvar (only under its “Czechvar” pseudonym) in the United States while continuing international legal battles over the name “Budweiser.”

But talk of Budvar’s sale (subscription required) has returned, as the Prague Daily Monitor news desk reports, via Hospodářské noviny.

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