Heineken Experience: The Brewery Outside the Walls

Why is it significant?

Stand by the water of the Singelgracht and face the long red-brick building with the green lettering and the brewery towers. For more than a hundred and twenty years, this was where Amsterdam's most famous beer was actually made.

Key Facts

Listen · 2:30

Stand by the water of the Singelgracht and face the long red-brick building with the green lettering and the brewery towers. For more than a hundred and twenty years, this was where Amsterdam's most famous beer was actually made. When it opened in 1867 there was almost nothing around it... just meadows, ditches and the old city line marked by the canal behind you. The man behind it was Gerard Adriaan Heineken. In 1864, aged just twenty-two, he bought an old brewery in the city centre called De Hooiberg, the Haystack. The family story goes that he wanted Amsterdammers drinking beer instead of gin. Within three years he needed space, clean water and room to grow, and there was only one place to find all three: outside the walls, right here. But the real secret was not bricks. It was yeast. In 1886 the company's chemist, Hartog Elion, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, cultivated a single pure strain of yeast in the firm's laboratory. It became known as the A-yeast, and it gave the beer the same taste batch after batch, year after year. A Dutch brewery had turned beer into a laboratory science... and that consistency is a big part of why the green bottle travelled the world. In 1988 brewing stopped here for good, and production moved to a far larger plant outside the city. In 1991 the old brewery opened to visitors, and since 2001 it has been called the Heineken Experience. Part of the site became housing and a square behind the building, and here is a detail almost nobody notices: the Marie Heinekenplein, named in 1994, is not named after the brewer at all, but after Marie Heineken, a relative of his and a painter of flowers. Everything you will see on this walk grew up in the brewery's shadow. The streets behind it were thrown up for the workers of breweries, factories and docks, and they have been feeding the city ever since. So follow the Ferdinand Bolstraat south, past the end of the brewery, to the corner where the striped awnings of the market begin.