Heineken

You're standing at the heart of one of the most unlikely success stories in Dutch history. In 1841, Gerard Adriaan Heineken was born into a merchant family in Amsterdam. By the time he was 22, he had done something spectacularly bold: he bought a crumbling, 300-year-old steam brewery called De Hooiberg. Beer was losing popularity, and Gerard knew almost nothing about brewing. Honestly, not the most reassuring start. Yet somehow it worked. Heineken quickly built a larger brewery right here in the city and started pushing beyond Amsterdam's borders, because local competition, including a certain brand called Amstel, was getting fierce. 

The real explosion came under grandson Freddy Heineken, who had a talent for business that his father Henry had apparently skipped entirely. Freddy bought Amstel outright, snapped up breweries across the world, and brought American advertising tricks back to Europe to make the green bottle impossible to ignore. Then in 1983, things took a dramatic turn. Freddy and his driver were kidnapped right at the Amsterdam office, in what became one of the most infamous crimes in Dutch history. Today, Heineken oversees more than 300 brands worldwide, including Tiger and Birra Moretti. 

Cheers to that.