When two becomes one

As the years went on, Robbert became more deeply enmeshed in craft beer, and the brewery, working five-to-six days a week, doing tap takeovers on the weekend, travelling the Netherlands, UK, Europe the US and beyond. He prides himself on being able to chat to anyone, and fondly remembers talking his way into a tap takeover in Mikkeller bar San Francisco after pouring Uiltje at Oregon Brewers Festival, just a year and a half after founding the brewery. 

At the time, IPA wasn’t unheard of in the Netherlands so much as it was strongly disliked. People were used to drinking Belgian, German, British and Czech beer, all of which lacked the distinct bitterness of American hops. Robbert found craft beer exciting because of how different it was, and so used modern American hops as often as he could get his hands on them.

He says Uiltje owes its success in part to finding its feet in the right place at the right time. Craft beer took off in Holland just as Robbert was beginning to pump out really good quality IPAs and serendipitously, the market’s appetite for variety and newness matched his drive to create and experiment. If he brewed a crazy beer, someone would buy it, and the success of the brand allowed Uiltje to open its own brick-and-mortar brewery in Haarlem. 

However, as ends up being the case with a lot of breweries born of raw creativity, into a market that’s hungry for it, Uiltje grew into a much bigger beast than Robbert had ever intended for it to be. “I started the brewery because I'm a bit over creative. I just wanted to make new beers, and be busy with that, but a couple years down the road it wasn’t just a brewery anymore. It was also a big company, with a team to support. So things changed, but I was changing too. When I started the brewery I was 26, next week I'm turning 40. I’m married now, I have kids.” Something had to give.

Robbert says that for years, Uiltje sold its beer through Bier&Co, a wholesalers and one of Europe’s biggest importers of beer and other beverages, owned by Swinkels. It had also bought its malt through Holland Malts, a maltings also owned by Swinkels. “So we were buying from Swinkels, making beer out of what they sold to us, and then we were selling it back to them for such a long time,” says Robbert. “It worked fine, but they could see us growing, and we could see them growing, and so eventually, they asked if we’d be interested in working more closely together.”

It wasn’t that he was apprehensive — Robbert saw the opportunity to join the Swinkels portfolio as a positive thing — so much as he had conditions. A hundred years ago, Robbert’s hometown of Haarlem was the brewing capital of Holland, but the emergence of international conglomerates saw bigger players buy up all the small breweries in the city and close them down just to eliminate competition. Robbert saw this as having a detrimental effect on Dutch beer culture, which came to lack variety and lose sight of traditional Dutch beer styles. He was willing to join forces with Swinkels, but he didn’t want to lose Uiltje in everything but name. 

“We agreed to join Swinkels on the condition that we could have our own identity,” says Robbert. “You know, sometimes you see the takeover of a brewery, and the bigger company will completely change their recipes, or their branding or the tone of voice of the brewery. We wanted to still be independent, to decide what we make, and still be creative. Luckily, almost four years later, we’re still doing that. 

“Obviously, when you're smaller, you're a bit more agile and you can do things faster. When Uiltje first started we could think of a beer we wanted to make on a Friday and brew it on Monday morning. We can’t do that anymore — we have to do a little bit more planning — but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think sometimes in the past, we were a bit too creative, and everything was very last minute, which isn’t always a good thing. Apart from that, we're still doing the same thing that we did 10 years ago. We’re just a bunch of really creative people, and we just want to make new beers and be busy with new things.” 

So, although Swinkels does represent big and small, macro and micro, international and local all at once, it is undeniably a global entity, with a finger in an intimidating number of pies. It is the sum of many parts, within which people like Robbert are operating, creating local jobs and contributing to local culture. Speaking with Swinkels senior marketing manager Emma Harris, I think I can understand why the parent company encourages so much autonomy within the various arms of its operations.  

She says that 2024 saw the eighth generation of the Swinkels family introduced to the business. Today, that looks like teaching the new generation how the various arms of Swinkels work, before setting them free in the world to find their passion and hone their skillset for 10-15 years. From there, the idea is that family members will bring their experience back to Swinkels, where it can reinvigorate the business and keep it future-fit. 

“The family members are given a huge amount of time, scope and space to figure out where their passions lie, and they’re only invited to get heavily involved if they really want to,” says Emma. “The whole point of the business is to make the company better for the next generation. That’s not just from a financial standpoint, but making sure that everyone’s future is as bright as possible.” 

Swinkels understands that for people to be productive and creative they have to be happy, and you have to play to their strengths. And so, while Uiltje brews, Swinkels continues to innovate and invest in the operations side that connects the many, far reaching arms of its portfolio.