March 27, 2018

Heineken pulls controversial advert in the US

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 10:18 pm

heinekenjpg

Heineken, and the oblivious people that green lit this script, have produced a “terribly racist” advert that has been pulled after America’s Chance The Rapper called them out on it, on social media.

With the tagline ‘lighter is better’, referring to a range of light beers, a light skinned barman sees a similarly light skinned woman and slides a beer down the bar past two black patrons and one black musician. The beer slides for a long time being light and all, but the unfortunate message is loud and clear.

Chance The Rapper said it seems like companies pull stunts like this to purposely bait people to write about them, and that in this case, he had to say something. Heineken had since apologised, saying they “missed the mark”.

The offending commercial is shown at 0:33:

(Link: www.nu.nl)

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June 25, 2017

Mexicans accuse Heineken of lying about tequila

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 4:01 pm

desperados-tequila

Originally created by a French brewery and now brewed in Croatia for Heineken, Desperados beer sells in 85 international markets, but no longer in the United States since about 2015.

Desperados, which has been on sale for two decades, is now a problem for the Mexican authorities who claim that Heineken is messing with the rules on designation of origin. To put it plainly, there is no tequila in this tequila-flavoured beer according to Ramón González, Director of the CRT (Tequila Regulatory Council).

“Either they take the word ‘tequila’ off it, or they put some tequila in.” If they refuse, “we’ll have no choice but to fight this [in court]”, says González. The CRT reigns supreme over the use of tequila much like the French authorities do with champagne. And it was the cost of suing Heineken apparently that had stop them from threatening them until now.

A Heineken spokesman claims that Desperados is a beer flavoured with tequila, meaning that there is tequila in the beer. However, the CRT had the beer tested in Madrid and was told that there’s no tequila at all in the beer, which would mean it’s false advertising. The product is said to have trace amounts of tequila and is technically classified as a malt beverage, which means it’s about the presence or absence of hops.

Mexico and the Netherlands have had a tumultuous relationship on this blog, including Dutch and Mexicans girls duelling in videos and King Willem-Alexander using rude words in a speech)

(Links: ft.com, adage.com, wikipedia, Photo of Desperados beer by DrinkUpEssex)

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August 11, 2016

Heineken pretends to care about people, gets caught out

Filed under: Sports by Orangemaster @ 9:47 pm

Heineken is seriously thinking about getting bars owners in Amsterdam to serve its beer with tap water on the side to promote ‘responsible drinking’ and bars owners are not thrilled at the idea.

For those who don’t know, a large proportion of bars around the country are stuck serving Heineken because that’s how they pay for their beer-tapping equipment and basically stay in business. Being shrewd in business is one thing, pretending to care is totally ridiculous and hypocritical. Isn’t the goal to sell as much beer as possible?

Normally I’d brush this off but ever since Dutch athlete Yuri van Gelder went from being ‘Lord of the Rings’ (his discipline) to ‘Lord of the Drink’ in the Dutch and international media this week for having consumed alcohol and being kicked out of the Olympics for it, it’s time to call Heineken out on their bullshit.

The Dutch have this party tent idea they set up at the Olympics and other major sporting events called the Heineken Holland House: a bigazz orange party tent for the athletes and their fans to have a drink and watch Dutch athletes perform on TV. After a Dutch athlete has a win, they often pop down to the HHH and let people applaud them and probably have a drink as well.

Heineken’s response to the incident was that they don’t sponsor, they only facilitate a place to party. Hello? The Dutch Twitterati published Heineken sponsorship contracts to make their point clear after which the beer giant admitted to not have expressed itself properly – no kidding.

And if that wasn’t stupid enough, beer competitor Grolsch started making puns on Heineken’s slogan “Heerlijk Helder Heineken’ (roughly ‘Delicious Clear Heineken’) using Van Gelder’s name: ‘Heerlijk Van Gelder Heineken’, which sounds similar. And look at how they drove the point home, suggesting Van Gelder drink 0% beer instead (picture).

Back in 2010 Van Gelder was dropped from the Dutch team for the Gymnastics World Championships after he admitted using cocaine. After cleaning up his act, surely training very hard like all athletes and now breaking the rules, he’s been sent home from Rio.

The way Heineken handled its position was lame and attempting to push water to go with your beer as some sort of responsible drinking is super lame.

Heineken, shut up or go home.

(Link: at5.nl)

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July 2, 2016

KLM to serve Heineken draught beer on flights

Filed under: Aviation,Dutch first,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:42 pm

klm-plane-steven-straiton

Two years ago Heineken developed the Brewlock tap system, which addresses the issue of delivering draught beer at the right level of carbonation. And if KLM is to serve beer high up in the air, it needs to be tapped properly and not spray out of the keg due to a lack of carbonation.

The system will be fitted onto a trolley for serving and will be pre-cooled before takeoff and then kept cool for a maximum of eight hours with insulating material. KLM plans to serve beer on tap on a few selected flights and then eventually roll it out.

Roll out the barrel, and we’ll have a barrel of fun – in the air.

(Link: www.telegraaf.nl, photo by Steven Straiton, some rights reserved)

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November 15, 2015

Smugglers disguise Dutch beer as soft drinks

Filed under: Food & Drink,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:19 pm

Trying to smuggle alcohol into Saudi Arabia where it is illegal carries serious consequences if we believe the media. Smugglers have tried to disguise 48,000 cans of Heineken as Pepsi cola ones using crafty stickers. We could also flog the makers of Heineken, but that’s just a pipe dream.

Just this week an elderly British man living in Saudi Arabia was released from jail after spending one year in a cell for making homemade wine. More than 230,000 people had signed an online petition calling for the British Prime Minister to intervene to stop Mr Andree from facing 350 lashings, a punishment the man would probably not have survived after battling cancer and being asthmatic.

In the Netherlands, a song by Jaap Visser once told us that in fact ‘Heineken is a hard drug dealer’ and makes a great argument for banning it.

Heineken wrecks everything
Leidseplein, your marriage
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
The hospitals are full
With victims of alcohol
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
Don’t let yourself be cheated
Don’t let yourself be fooled
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
And if the stadium is violently destroyed
Heineken sits sanctimoniously at home
Counting his money

(Link: www.independent.co.uk)

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June 8, 2015

Google, KLM and government favourites with Dutch students

Filed under: Aviation,Food & Drink,General,IT,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:09 pm

klm-plane-steven-straitonSwedish marketing agency Universum has been polling Dutch students on who they want to work for after graduation.

A whopping 12,000 students from 32 universities and polytechnics were asked about their career preferences. Major Dutch companies such as Philips, Shell, KLM, Heineken and Endemol were named, but large American companies such as Google and Apple also made their appearance.

Both law and arts & humanities students named the national government as their preferred employer, followed by Google for the former and KLM for the latter. Business students like KLM and Google the best, engineering and physics students prefer Google, followed by Philips.

Compared to last year, TNO, Coca-Cola, IKEA and De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek failed to make the top 5 in any of the categories.

(Link: ANS, photo by Steven Straiton, some rights reserved)

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March 5, 2015

American Heineken film loaded with mistakes

Filed under: Film,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:36 pm

Colbert-report

‘Kidnapping Mr. Heineken’, a 2015 American film about the kidnapping of Dutch beer tycoon Freddy Heineken, is not only getting bad reviews from the international and Dutch press, but is also has enough mistakes to keep everybody busy.

Maarten Treurniet directed the 2011 Dutch film ‘De Heineken ontvoering’ (‘The Heineken Kidnapping’), staring a cast of actual Dutch people including Rutger Hauer, while Kidnapping Mr. Heineken apparently couldn’t be bothered with authenticity and casted mostly British and other non-Dutch actors. While the Dutch film set in 1983 Amsterdam has many anachronistic items from the 1990s and a few references to 1984, the American film messed up big time by showing the wrong coloured beer bottles, which should be brown instead of green.

NU.nl says that, “it is a weird mistake because the makers were attentive to very small details, even the police cars are from 1983.” The mistake was easy to make because Heineken has always exported its beer in green bottles, but in the Netherlands domestic bottles were brown, a ‘stupid mistake’. Even Dutch crime journalist and author Peter R. de Vries whose book was used to script the film was so displeased with the final product he couldn’t be arsed to go to the film’s premiere in the US.

If you like your Heineken humour on the absurd side, find out why a Dutch beer brand was a good choice for celebrating February’s Black History Month in the US a few years back.

(Link: www.nu.nl, Screenshot of The Colbert Report)

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July 20, 2013

How Heineken branched out into bricks for a short while

Filed under: Design,Food & Drink,Sustainability by Branko Collin @ 11:36 pm

In the 1960 Dutch beer brewer Heineken came up with the idea of using rectangular, stackable beer bottles thinking that they could be re-used as building materials.

Cabinet Magazine writes how Freddy Heineken got the idea when visiting Curaçao in 1960:

[Heineken] noted with dismay the acres of trash underfoot—a good part of it produced by his own company. Heineken Breweries had an efficient bottle-return system in Holland, where the average bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. But without modern distribution, bottles in Curaçao were used once and thrown out. There was no lack of resulting trash: what the island did lack, however, was affordable housing. Heineken had a flash of brilliance: make beer bottles that you can build houses out of.

An initial bottle design by architect John Habraken—a long slender bottle to be stacked vertically—was vetoed by Heineken’s marketing department for being too ‘effeminate’. The second design was the squat bottle you see in the photo. Of this 100,000 bottles were produced and even a prototype shed near Freddy Heineken’s villa in Noordwijk.

(Photo by greezer.ch, some rights reserved)

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