Less than a month after Hungary’s intervention and without explicitly linking their action to it, Heineken and Mr. 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,” John-Paul 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 Mr. 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.