When the financial crisis hit in the United States, it also was a big blow to one particular Dutch brewery that pretty much only made one beer. Heineken’s sales went down for a couple of years and its U.S President, Don Blaustein, left in August of 2009 “saying he had a different view over how to expand Heineken in the U.S. during the recession,” as Bloomberg recalls.

We’ll never know if Blaustein’s ideas would have worked given more time, but the new guy, Dolf van den Brink (one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40 execs to watch this year), seems to be figuring it out just fine. “We weren’t in a good position in 2008, 2009,” he told the site. “For 45 years, we were a single-brand operation. We were set in our ways.”

His job, of course, has been to shake up those ways.Continue reading...

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Though the average resident of India sips half a six-pack of beer each year – compared with the six cases put away by those in hops-happy nations – the population-dense country is considered “the last frontier for significant growth in the beer industry” by Heineken’s chief executive, Jean-François von Boxmeer.

The Dutch beer brand targeted India as a growing market three years ago, adding 76 percent ownership of India's Aurangabad Breweries to its majority stake of Asia Pacific Breweries (APB), which brews the popular Tiger Beer.

A legal dispute concerning another Indian beer conglomerate – United Breweries, the top brewer in India – was finally untangled, paving the way for tapped Heineken kegs in pubs from Srinagar to Thiruvananthapuram.Continue reading...