FR Moulineaux — S.A. Bières Grütli

The Brasserie des Moulineaux sat in a small commune south of Rouen, in the Seine valley of Normandy. It brewed under the Grütli name — marketed as a Bière de Luxe — and won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, which suggests it was already a well-established operation by the turn of the century. The brewery produced several variants: Grütli, Grütli Pils, and a range of bock styles, distributed under both the Grütli and Bière des Moulineaux labels.

In 1938, S.A. Bières Grütli appeared in Heineken’s annual report, listed among minor participations alongside Palestine Brewery, Brasseries de la Meuse, and other small stakes in the Interbra network. What the published annual reports did not reveal was that the relationship would last twenty-two years. Documents held in Heineken’s own corporate archive at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam confirm that HBM — Heineken’s Bierbrouwerij Maatschappij — held shares in S.A. Bières Grütli from 1938 to 1960, alongside a connected holding entity called Société de Gérance Industrielle et de Brasserie. The stake was evidently small enough that it disappeared from public annual reports after its first mention, but significant enough to generate two decades of internal correspondence.

Why Heineken held it, what it paid, and why it sold in 1960 are not documented in sources available to this archive. The physical files exist in Amsterdam — archive 834, file 3258 — for anyone who wants to go further.

The brewery buildings were converted after the Second World War and demolished in 1981. The Grütli brand disappeared with them. It exists now in the collections of French beer label enthusiasts, one line of a 1938 Dutch annual report, and a folder in an Amsterdam archive that nobody has opened in a very long time.