Dutch beer 1938 - 1961

I found a strange little document in the Amsterdam Archives. Not one I had asked to be digitised. That honour goes to my friend Peter Symons. 

Its source is the CBK (the Dutch brewers' association). The first page has an overview of the Dutch brewing industry in 1961. The rest seems to be the draught of a promotional blurb about the Amstel brewery. Full of annotations and requests to check various facts. The two sections seem totally unconnected.

It's the first page that I'll be looking at today. I like it because it's got some lovely big, fat numbers. Exactly my sort of thing.

First some general stuff. In 1961 there were 34 breweries in Holland, of which ten exported. Quite a high percentage, considering.Between them, they employed 5,500 people. Which doesn't sound a lot. That works out to around 162 per brewery. That must only include those directly employed and not those working in pubs.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Holland really got its act together between the wars in the growing of malting barley. In 1961, it was totally self-sufficient.

I'll finish with a lovely table. Note what a high proportion of production was exported . This grew even more, hitting around 50% in the 1990s.

Dutch beer 1938 - 1961 (hl)
year	Dutch sales	exports	total	% exported
1938	1,269,356	111,512	1,380,868	8.08%
1950	1,068,462	360,084	1,428,546	25.21%
1955	1,719,188	664,725	2,383,913	27.88%
1960	2,635,339	916,314	3,551,653	25.80%
1961	2,935,999	865,583	3,801,582	22.77%
Source:
Holland en Bier held at the Amsterdamse Stadsarchief, document number 31121 1139, page 1.