A two-cent discount
The Dutch cabinet wants to scrap the reduced beer duty for small breweries. It saves the treasury 2 million euros and costs the drinker 1 or 2 cents a glass. What disappears is in neither figure.
In Leiden a brewer walks through the university’s botanical garden a few times a year with a pair of secateurs. Bergamot, hibiscus, cinnamon leaf. He does it alongside someone who knows what is poisonous. His brewery is called Pronck, makes 1,000 hectolitres a year and is poured in 56 cafés and restaurants in and around the town. One of his newer beers contains Russian Earl Grey extract, because he is fond of tea.
I read about him in the paper because the cabinet wants to abolish something I did not know existed. Since 1992 small breweries in the Netherlands have paid slightly less duty than large ones. The discount is 7.5 per cent: 7.51 euros per hectolitre per degree of alcohol instead of 8.12. In Germany and Belgium the same discount is 50 per cent.
The finance ministry evaluated the scheme and found it ineffective. It saves 1 or 2 cents a glass, and its purpose in its present form is unclear. Scrapping it brings in about 2 million euros. Both numbers are right, and both say the same thing: this is about very little.
The brewers say something else. A supermarket has room for sixteen beers and the supply is eighty. The brewer from Leiden calls it a beauty contest. Whoever costs more per litre because he is small loses it to whoever is large. The discount was meant to soften that disadvantage of scale a little. According to the trade association, bankruptcies are raining down.
I know nothing about excise. What struck me is the kind of sum being made here. A scheme costs 2 million and yields 2 cents a glass, so it does nothing, so it can go. That is tidy reasoning for something you can measure per glass. What a small brewery adds is that Leiden has a beer with flowers from its own garden, that a new flavour can be on the shelf within six weeks, that a town has a beer that tastes of that town.
That is heritage in the making. In fifty years it will be called tradition and get a plaque by the door. Today it is called a 2-million item with an unclear purpose.
Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, spent his life resisting food cultures that grow ever more alike and flatten as a result. He was talking about farmers, cheese and tomatoes. It holds for beer just as well. A country with a few large brewers and endless labels is poorer than a country with hundreds of small brewers each trying something different.
Perhaps the discount is too small to make the difference, as the ministry says. Then another conclusion suggests itself more readily than abolition. The neighbours have already drawn it.
Source: Aniek Wiggers, NRC, 11 September 2026, for all figures and quotations.