Friday 10 December 2021

Effect of WW II on the Dutch brewing industry

Curse Peter Symons. He's got another document digitised which is going to cost me weeks of work.

It's called ""De Nederlandse Brouwindustrie in Cijfers" ("The Dutch brewing industry in numbers") and is stiffed full of useful numbers, including ones covering the war years. Providing me with so much information, I'm contemplating ripping the section on Dutch brewing oit and making it a separate volume. "Blutzkrieg! Vol, 3", I suppose.

Here's the first bit I've written using the new data.

Compared to the devastating effect of WW I on Belgian brewing – when hundreds of breweries were stripped of their copper by the Germans and never reopened – Holland didn’t fare too badly. Breweries weren’t looted and continued to brew until the raw materials ran out.

Only 16 breweries – all very small – closed during the war years. Compared to 36 in the first nine years of peace. The closure in 1949 if a brewery which was responsible for 5.3% of Dutch beer output has to be van Vollenhoven. It accounted for over half the production capacity lost between 1938 and 1954.


Dutch breweries 1938 - 1954
year working breweries closed during the year cumulative total of closed breweries production share of closed breweries cumulative total of closed breweries
1938 99
1939 98 1 1 0.0126 0.0126
1940 98 1 0.0126
1941 95 3 4 0.0490 0.0616
1942 93 2 6 0.0079 0.0695
1943 92 1 7 0.0113 0.0808
1944 87 5 12 0.2811 0.3619
1945 83 4 16 0.8939 1.2558
1946 79 4 20 0.3153 1.5711
1947 76 3 23 0.1511 1.7222
1948 72 4 27 0.2547 1.9769
1949 66 6 33 5.2927 7.2696
1950 60 6 39 0.6670 7.9366
1951 54 6 45 0.8456 8.7822
1952 50 4 49 0.6478 9.4300
1953 47 5 52 0.7659 10.1959
1954 47 52 10.1959
Source:
De Nederlandse Brouwindustrie in Cijfers, by Dr. H. Hoelen, Centraal Brouwerij Kantoor, 1955, page 15, held at the Amsterdam City Archives.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any idea why closings grew after the war?

Did peacetime make it easier for bigger breweries to take over market share and consolidate operations?

Tritun Books said...

I aim to please. Curses are like the proverbial off the ducks back. Cheers

Ron Pattinson said...

Anonymous,

during the war there was a disincentive to close breweries as each was allocated a certain quantity of raw materials. For example, Amstel and Heineken bought van Vollenhoven during the war but kept it open, only to close it shortly after the end of hostilities.