Heineken is among the top three brewing companies in the world. It is probably also the best known brand of beer worldwide. And its strategy and senior management are still controlled by the same family that founded the company 150 years ago. These three features are the key elements of Keetie Sluyterman and Bram Bouwens’s history of Heineken, which was commissioned by the company on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in 2014.

Sluyterman and Bouwens, seasoned business historians working at the University of Utrecht, have organized their story in seven parts, each one dealing with a progressively shorter period of time. After a prelude about the ups and downs of the brewery De Hooiberg in Amsterdam, founded in 1592, whose purchase by the twenty-two-year-old Gerard Heineken in 1864 marks the start of the Heineken company, the next six chapters each discuss a distinct phase in the development of the firm: becoming a leading brewer of lager in the Netherlands between 1864 and 1914, expanding cooperation in the brewing industry in the interwar years, searching for new markets between 1945 and 1968, integrating and diversifying the company between 1968 and 1985, dealing with globalization and European integration between 1985 and 2002, and finally making large international acquisitions in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A number of themes recur in the book: technological innovation, the relation between Heineken and its competitors, sales strategy and brand management, approaches to international expansion, policies concerning human capital, and the family character of the firm. Analyzing these factors, the authors assumed, should take us a long way toward understanding Heineken's long-term success. In addition, the ambience in which the company operates is fully taken into account. For each period, Sluyterman and Bouwens provide basic information about its economic, social, and political context and repeatedly compare Heineken's performance with that of other relevant players in the field, moving up in time from locally active brewers via firms operating on a national scale to huge multinational companies such as Carlsberg, SABMiller, and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

The broad line of the argument is that the relative weight of these factors changed over time—except the family character, which has continued to be of great importance throughout the firm's history. Technological innovation was crucial in the start-up phase of the company. Heineken was one of the early adopters in the Netherlands of the new techniques of brewing lager and making artificial ice to keep temperatures low during the brewing process; it also pioneered the development of new types of pure yeast. Innovations in products and processes continued to take place in later phases as well, but these were of an incremental rather than a groundbreaking nature. What became increasingly important in the twentieth century were cooperation with or acquisition of other firms, expansion drives into international markets, professional training of employees, and skillful advertising campaigns and brand management strategies to position Heineken as an international premium beer. The constant factor was the role of the Heineken family. The authors insist that, even if the Heinekens after 1873 “no longer had full ownership or complete managerial control” and the reigns of successive scions of the family were interspersed by several “interregnums,” it was members of the Heineken family that set the basic parameters for the company's actions by selecting the highest ranking managers, making key financial decisions, easing or obstructing expansionist policies, and all the while carefully guarding the image of the Heineken brand (p. 537).

Brewery, Brand, and Family is thoroughly researched, eminently readable, and beautifully produced. Much of the material in the book results from new, extensive research in the company's archives. The argument rests on a wealth of statistical data, summarized in diagrams and graphs in soft, greenish tints, which enliven rather than overburden the text. Moreover, the book includes a large number of folding pages containing pictures, many of them printed in color, with accompanying notes that add personal detail to the main story. It is a sheer joy to look at. The visual material also contains a portrait gallery of the members of the management board of Heineken from 1864 to the present—but it lacks, alas, a family tree of the Heineken family, which is somewhat odd for a book about a firm dominated by a single family for 150 years.

I find the authors’ explanation of Heineken's long-term success on the whole very persuasive; however, I think they should have pushed their analysis a bit further at two important points. The first one concerns the reliability of the balance sheet figures of Heineken in the interwar years. When a trained expert from the banking world, Dirk Stikker, joined the Heineken management board in 1935, he discovered to his surprise that the company's balance sheet did not give a true picture of the financial state of affairs at all (p. 192). If Stikker's assessment was correct, what are the implications for the authors’ story on the company's development, which is, after all, partly based on those very figures (see, for example, p. 163)? The question is not addressed. But if the authors think Stikker's remark was exaggerated, why let it pass without comment? The second point relates to the family character of the Heineken firm. While the book offers plenty of details about the personal life of the Heinekens, it hardly probes into what one might call the “culture” of the Heineken family. The authors observe that the Heinekens, in contrast to many other founding families in business, were determined “to maintain a decisive influence” in the firm, but they do not pursue why this particular family made such an eccentric choice (pp. 539–40). Why did the Heinekens cling to their firm? What were the underlying family values of the Heinekens, and how were these transmitted over time? At the end of the day, Sluyterman and Bouwens's book tells us more about the brewery and the brand than about the family. As a company history, their book is nonetheless a triumphant achievement.