Small Transylvania brewery stood up to an industry giant, and it survived
SANSIMION, Romania — Beer is cheap and abundant in this farm village, hidden near the slopes of the Transylvanian mountains. A dim local bar displays it behind glass doors, in refrigerators filled with cans, glass bottles and 2-liter plastic containers. Most are lagers from well-known global brewers, easy to find across Europe.
Here, Andras Lenard, 39, an intrepid local businessman known for daring projects involving hydroelectric power and security drones, in 2013 took over the dilapidated distillery that supplied the region with spirits in the communist era and began making his own beer.
Ads here often show off beer’s similar characteristics to mineral water, and the beverages cost about the same. Brewers claim to use fresh spring water from pristine mountain settings. They boast about their links to the traditions of their craft and the local history. Lenard promised to brew a natural beer, unpasteurized and made according to the centuries-old German purity law.
The brewery started small, filling only 20,000 green bottles a day. Lenard called his beer Csiki Sor (pronounced “cheeky shore”), after the Hungarian name for the region, Csik. For decades, Csiki Sor was what Hungarian speakers in this region of Transylvania had called Bere Ciuc, a beer produced at an older brewery about 10 miles up the road, in Miercurea Ciuc.
The Dutch giant Heineken acquired the old brewery in 2003, and its Romanian subsidiary now produces its beer under the brand name Ciuc (pronounced “chook”) Premium, after the Romanian name for the region. In 2014, Heineken said the name of Lenard’s beer was too close to its own and filed a civil lawsuit for breach of intellectual property.
Lenard responded with guerrilla marketing, dispatching vans with “Real Csiki Sor” logos on their sides into villages and town squares, and running a social media campaign. One promotional animated video spoke of “the struggle for Real Csiki Sor.” In it, a man in traditional folk clothing with an accent typical of the region wrestled a bear in the forest over a bottle of beer he had left to cool in the stream. Behind him, a man wearing clogs sneaked up to the stream and tried to steal the beer.
The campaign hit a nerve in neighboring Hungary, where about 60 percent of Lenard’s product is sold. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made it a priority to speak up for Hungarian minorities abroad and to promote a form of economic patriotism. Protecting the Csiki brand against Heineken seemed to fit right in.
This spring, shortly after Heineken Romania won the latest round in court and was going to see the Csiki Sor brand disappear from the shelves, an unexpected benefactor showed up. Orban’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, traveled to Sansimion and raised a glass of Csiki with Lenard. The Hungarian government also announced a proposal to ban the use of Heineken’s redstar logo as a symbol of communism, already forbidden by law.
“When the Hungarian government forms its economic policy, it doesn’t only think of the country, but the nation,” Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He said Hungary had to protect its own businesses and make sure that multinational companies couldn’t “abuse their position of advantage, which comes exactly from the fact that they operate on an international scale.”
Less than a month after Hungary’s intervention and without explicitly linking their action to it, Heineken and Lenard’s company agreed to coexist peacefully and drop all related legal actions. “We recognized the emotional value of the Csiki brand name to its brewers and consumers, as well as to its stakeholders in both Romania and Hungary,” JohnPaul Schuirink, director for global communication at Heineken, said in an email. He added that the company would use all means to defend its red-star logo.
Even before Hungary intervened, the legal battle was heralded as the struggle of a small local producer against a corporate behemoth, echoing the long legal dispute between Anheuser-busch and the Czech brewery Budejovicky Budvar. But mostly, it played to popular skepticism and sometimes overt government hostility toward multinational companies and their products in Central and Eastern Europe.
It wasn’t always this way. After the fall of Romania’s isolated communist regime, foreign products in bright packaging pushed drab local products off the shelves. There was a mood nearing euphoria as, one by one, long-coveted foreign brands became available. But as disappointment with the effects of globalization grew, so did skepticism toward foreign products.
“People realized that Grandma’s jam isn’t so bad after all,” said Lenard, sitting in his executive office by wide windows that overlook the state-of-the-art brewery he created out of the former distillery’s crumbling concrete. “The local community has realized that local produce is good.”
In recent years, the Csiki brewery has quadrupled daily production and grown in size. Shiny new equipment fills sizable halls. It has also become something of a tourist attraction. A path leads visitors through the brewing process, from the mashing of earthy-smelling grains to the pouring of the golden liquid into bottles. The visitors can taste crunchy barley and bitter hops. At the end, they hand-pull their own pints in a bar that has a Heineken-branded punching bag.
Lenard described his attitude as mischievous, or “gobe,” a word that locals use to describe Szeklers, the Hungarian-speaking population in the region.
“This product has helped buoy national pride,” Lenard said of his beer. “And this struggle with Heineken, whether or not intentionally, here in the Szekler land, has become the symbol of the local struggle to survive.”
Csiki has certainly helped to bolster the Szekler brand, but to its detractors, it has put too much of an accent on patriotic marketing and has grown too big to be truly artisanal. Still, Lenard insisted that even if the dispute had brought useful publicity, he said it had taken attention away from the fact that he makes “quality beer.”
“It’s an OK beer,” Razvan Costache, who runs a blog about rare craft beer, said in an interview in Bucharest. “You can drink it when you’re thirsty on a terrace.”
Artisanal breweries are still a rarity in Romania, Costache said, with Csiki being the largest. He said he had tasted both Csiki and Ciuc and found only a slight difference.
Lenard and Costache both cited an article, by the investigative journalism group Rise Project, that said big breweries hurry fermentation by adding various substances in the brewing process.
“I agree that, having a smaller production than Ciuc, they allow themselves the time to do the fermenting, and everything by the books,” Costache said of Csiki. But Ciuc, he said, is “an industrial beer. I can’t say that I was impressed by how natural it was.”
Csiki Sor was hardly alone in Romania in appealing to patriotic sentiment with its brand image. Romanians drink about four times as much beer as wine and they are constantly bombarded with slogans like “the beer of Romanians wherever they are,” including from multinational companies.
Despite the settlement, Lenard said that he would continue to market his product as “Forbidden Csiki,” a name it took on after a court in January ordered the destruction of promotional material linked to the brand name.
“For each product the story is crucial,” he said. “‘Forbidden’ will remind people of the story. Like in whiskeys, nobody smuggles Old Smuggler but it’s good to have a hint to the story in the name.”