Almost two decades after stepping down as president of Russia’s largest brewer, businessman Taimuraz Bolloev is back in charge at Baltika and has set out to restore it to what he considers its 1990s heyday, before its acquisition by Denmark’s Carlsberg.

A friend of Vladimir Putin, Bolloev was appointed in July after Russia’s president placed Baltika under “temporary management”, a move leaving Carlsberg with title to the shares but no control of a business that had made up 10 per cent of its global revenues.

As Carlsberg reckons with the loss of its second-largest market, Bolloev and the company’s new management have ploughed ahead with plans to relaunch Baltika 3, a lager first brewed a year after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union that now bears Bolloev’s name on the bottle.