FR Metz — Brasseries Union Messine

Listed in Heineken annual reports from 1936 to 1938.

Metz has been fought over for most of its history. The city sits at the confluence of the Moselle and Seille rivers, at the point where France, Germany and Luxembourg press against each other, and its brewing industry reflected that instability as much as anything else. German brewers built it. French sequestration dismantled it. A merger rebuilt it. And then a world war nearly destroyed it entirely.

The brewery that would become Brasseries Union Messine was founded in 1903 by three German brothers on a site in Metz-Sablon, with an initial capacity of 80,000 hectolitres. At the time, Metz was part of the German Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen — annexed after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and not returned to France until 1918. After the First World War, the brewery’s German-owned assets were placed under French sequestration and eventually reconstituted as a French société anonyme. Its rival, the Brasserie Messine of Lauvallières — founded in 1872, also with German origins, also sequestered and reconstituted after the war — struggled for years before being absorbed by the Union brewery on 25 August 1936. The merged entity took the name Brasseries Union Messine.

That same year, 1936, Interbra — Heineken’s Belgian holding company — took a stake in the newly merged brewery. The timing was deliberate. Heineken was systematically building a network of minority participations across French and Belgian brewing, using Interbra as the vehicle. Union Messine, freshly merged and well-positioned in the Lorraine market, was a logical addition.

What happened next was beyond anyone’s planning. The Moselle was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1940, more violently than it had been in 1870. The brewery was placed under the supervision of a Dortmund brewing group and used to supply the German military. In November 1944, as American forces liberated Metz, a notorious SS general and thirty of his officers took refuge inside the brewery behind rows of beer barrels. They were captured by soldiers of the US 10th Infantry Regiment. It is, by any measure, an unusual episode in brewing history.

The brewery survived the war and continued operating. Heineken’s stake remained listed in annual reports through to 1956 — the year the brewery finally closed. The building was later used as municipal workshops and a car pound. It was demolished in 2010. Nothing remains of it on the Metz-Sablon site except the street plan