A German merchant, his son and a town south of Buenos Aires.

Quilmes is named after a place. The town of Quilmes, in Greater Buenos Aires south-east of the capital, took its name from the Quilmes, an indigenous people, and the brewery that opened there borrowed the name for its beer. English Wikipedia, citing a 2019 photo history in Perfil, says the brand recovered the former indigenous name of the place; Spanish Wikipedia says the same.

The founder was Otto Bemberg, a German merchant who had arrived in Argentina in 1852. Spanish Wikipedia, citing a history of the family published by Revista Mestiza, the magazine of the Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche, says he first worked importing textiles and exporting grain, and that his marriage into the Ocampo family, an influential Argentine family, helped him expand into other businesses. In 1888 he set up the Brasserie Argentine Société Anonyme in Paris together with his son Otto Sebastián Bemberg, who had trained in brewing at the Technical University of Munich. Two years later, on 31 October 1890, the brewery opened in Quilmes, and the first beer went on sale. According to the same source, the site was chosen for the quality of its water and for the nearby railway station.

English Wikipedia dates the company, Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes, to 1890 and calls Otto Bemberg its founder; Spanish Wikipedia gives 1888 for the Paris company and 1890 for the beer, so both dates appear in the record. English Wikipedia, citing Perfil, says the company paid towards a hospital for the town in 1918.

The business grew by buying rivals and by building its own supply chain. Spanish Wikipedia, again citing Revista Mestiza, says the Bemberg group took part in organising the Rigolleau glassworks in 1904 to make bottles, bought the Schlau brewery in 1907, and in 1913 merged its companies with the Germania and Buenos Aires breweries. It also set up its own maltings. English Wikipedia, citing Infobae, says that by the 1920s Quilmes was the most popular beer in Buenos Aires.

A tax case, a state takeover and a return.

For part of the twentieth century the brewery was not in the family’s hands. Spanish Wikipedia, citing the historian Claudio Belini’s 2008 study in the Mexican journal Secuencia, describes what became known as the Bemberg case. It began in 1937, when the heirs of Otto Sebastián Bemberg were taken to court over unpaid tax on an inheritance. The case stalled for years and was revived in 1946 under the government of Juan Domingo Perón. In 1952 a law ordered the judicial liquidation of the Bemberg group for tax fraud and monopoly, and on 4 February 1955 Congress handed control of the breweries to FOCA, the brewery workers’ federation.

The arrangement did not last. After the coup of September 1955, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing Broquel, a publication of Argentina’s Treasury Attorney’s office, from 2020, the new authorities began moves to return the companies, and under President Arturo Frondizi an out-of-court settlement returned them to the Bemberg heirs in January 1959.

The beer’s look is tied to the country. English Wikipedia, citing Infobae, says Quilmes became something of a national symbol, that it sponsored the Argentina national football team, and that the colours of its labels are those of the Argentine flag: light blue and white. Spanish Wikipedia names the core beer Quilmes Clásica, a lager, and lists Bock, Stout, Red Lager and Doble Malta among the other varieties. English Wikipedia says the company launched Liberty, described as the first non-alcoholic beer in Argentina, in 1993, and Quilmes Light four years later.

The most recent documented identity change came at the beer’s 130th anniversary. In November 2020 the design site Brandemia reported a new corporate logo for Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes, designed by draftLine, which Brandemia described as the company’s in-house creative studio for all its brands. The new mark kept the round bottle-cap shape of the previous corporate logo, put the founding year 1890 at its centre, drew the original brewery and maltings building with a pattern of sun and shade, and set the words “Cervecería y Maltería” in an uppercase sans fitted to the circle. Brandemia said the colours had been reduced to a single light blue and quoted the line “Cambió todo, pero no cambió nada” (“Everything changed, but nothing changed”). English Wikipedia says the earlier logo stayed in use as the logo of the Quilmes beer brand.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food and drink brands, and all of them come from Argentina or Brazil: Quilmes, SanCor, La Serenísima, Terrabusi, Mantecol, Fargo and Piraquê. Food and drink brands in these two countries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Bemberg family to AmBev, InBev and AB InBev.

The brewery left Argentine family ownership in stages. In May 2002, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing La Nación, the Bemberg family sold a 37.5% stake in Quinsa (Quilmes Industrial), the group’s holding company, to the Brazilian brewer AmBev, together with an option to buy the rest later. English Wikipedia, citing Ámbito Financiero, says the 2002 agreement gave AmBev control of the Quilmes brand in Argentina. AmBev merged with Belgium’s Interbrew in 2004 to form InBev.

In April 2006 the buyers brought the option forward. La Nación reported on 14 April 2006 that the group had bought most of the remaining shares, taking its holding in Quinsa to about 91%, in what the paper called the largest cash purchase of an Argentine company to that date. Clarín’s headline that day said Quilmes had passed entirely into Brazilian hands, and Infobae reported that Quilmes had stopped being Argentine. In 2008 InBev merged with Anheuser-Busch of the United States to form AB InBev, which is the ultimate parent of Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes today.

The beer is still brewed in Argentina. English Wikipedia says that in 2005 the company had plants in Quilmes, Zárate, Tres Arroyos, Corrientes, Tucumán and Mendoza, and that it exported Quilmes to a long list of countries, Brazil, the United States and Spain among them. Spanish Wikipedia, citing a 2018 Clarín report on a relaunch of the beer’s classic recipe, says the company describes its beer as made with Argentine ingredients, including Patagonian hops. Under AmBev the company also became a wider drinks business: English Wikipedia says it bought Baesa, the largest Pepsi bottling plant in Argentina, in 1999, bottles soft drinks and waters, some of them under licence from PepsiCo and Nestlé, and in February 2020 entered wine by buying the Dante Robino winery in Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza, as El Cronista reported at the time. The company headquarters remain in Quilmes.

For a design guide, Quilmes shows how a beer can borrow a country’s colours and a town’s name and hold on to both through more than a century and several owners. Compare SanCor, the dairy cooperative that also built its mark on light blue and white, and Terrabusi, the Buenos Aires biscuit maker that also passed into foreign ownership. For this guide we use celeste, white and a deep blue with a malt gold and an uppercase sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Quilmes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.