Timeline of Beer
Beer from possible Natufian brewing about 13,000 years ago through Sumer, Egypt, monasteries, hops and Bavaria's 1516 purity law to lager science, Prohibition, global conglomerates and the rise and slowdown of craft beer to 2025.
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- Agriculture & Food
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- 28 events ~13,000 years ago – 2025
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~13,000 years ago: Natufian foragers may brew beer at Raqefet Cave
Li Liu and colleagues reported in 2018 that starch residues in stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, a Natufian burial site on Mount Carmel in Israel, matched malted and mashed wheat or barley, and read them as the earliest known evidence of cereal brewing, perhaps for funeral feasts. A 2019 critique argued the mortars processed grain for food, and the reading remains disputed. Archaeologists have debated since 1953 whether beer rather than bread first drew people to grow cereals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raqefet_Cave#Proposed_beer_production~7000 BCE: Jiahu villagers ferment rice, honey and fruit
Chemical analysis of pottery from Jiahu, an early Neolithic village in Henan, China, published by Patrick McGovern and colleagues in 2004, found traces of a fermented drink of rice, honey and hawthorn fruit or grape, a hybrid of beer, wine and mead and among the earliest chemical evidence of alcohol anywhere. Residues in vessels from Mijiaya, in Xi'an, show beer brewed from broomcorn millet, barley, Job's tears and tubers about 3400 – 2900 BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiahu#Pottery_and_alcohol_production~3600 – 3400 BCE: Predynastic Egyptians brew beer at Hierakonpolis
Brewers at Hierakonpolis, a political center of Upper Egypt before the pharaohs, heated mashes of mostly malted emmer wheat with some barley in ceramic vats set over fires, sometimes sweetening them with fruit; a 2019 study called it the oldest known installation for large-scale beer production. Beer became a staple of the Egyptian diet, and a brewery at Abydos from about 3100 BCE, reported in 2021, had eight units of about 40 vats each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierakonpolis#Beer_production~3200 – 3000 BCE: Uruk scribes record beer in early accounts
Proto-cuneiform tablets from the late Uruk period in southern Mesopotamia list beer among grain products controlled by temple and palace households, distinguishing nine types by the signs for their jugs and recording two ingredients, probably coarsely ground barley and malt, but reveal little about brewing methods or strength. A jar of similar date from Godin Tepe in western Iran bears an oxalate residue like brewers' "beerstone", reported in 1992 as chemical evidence of beer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-cuneiform~1800 BCE: Babylonian scribes copy the Hymn to Ninkasi
The Sumerian hymn to Ninkasi, goddess of beer, survives in three copies made in the Old Babylonian period, about 1800 BCE, though the poem itself cannot be dated precisely. Since Miguel Civil's 1964 translation it has often been read as a recipe for beer made from bappir, a barley bread; scholars now question parts of that reading, on which Anchor Brewing of San Francisco based a beer in 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninkasi#Hymn_to_Ninkasi~1753 BCE: Code of Hammurabi regulates tavern keepers
Laws 108 to 111 of the Babylonian king Hammurabi's code, which Assyriologists read as concerning beer, govern women who kept taverns: one who refused grain in payment and gave short value was to be thrown into the water, and one who failed to report conspirators meeting in her house was to be put to death. A priestess who opened or entered a tavern to drink was to be burned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi~600 – 1000: Wari colonists brew chicha at Cerro Baúl
On the mesa of Cerro Baúl in southern Peru, colonists of the Wari empire ran a brewery with rooms for milling, boiling and fermenting chicha made from maize, berries of the molle (Peruvian pepper) tree or both; its 12 fermenting vats held up to 150 liters each. Shawl pins found there suggest elite women brewed, and when the Wari left about 1000 they held a final feast and burned the brewery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Ba%C3%BAl~820 – 830: Plan of Saint Gall includes monastic brewhouses
The Plan of Saint Gall, an idealized layout for a Benedictine monastery drawn at Reichenau for Abbot Gozbert of Saint Gall, shows a brewhouse beside the monks' bakery labeled "here let the beer for the brothers be brewed", with further brewhouses for guests and for pilgrims and the poor. The plan was never built as drawn, so it shows how monastic brewing was imagined, not proof that Saint Gall had three breweries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_of_Saint_Gall822: Abbot Adalhard's statutes link hops to beer
Statutes written by Abbot Adalhard for the abbey of Corbie in Picardy required tenants to gather hops and gave the abbey's porter a tenth of the malt and hops received to make his beer, the earliest known document linking hops with brewing. They do not say how the hops were used; around 1150 Hildegard of Bingen wrote that hops' bitterness kept drinks from spoiling, while unhopped ale, often flavored with herb mixtures such as gruit, remained common for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hops#History13th century: North German towns export hopped beer
Brewers in Hanseatic towns of northern Germany such as Bremen and Hamburg were exporting hopped beer, which kept far longer than unhopped ale, from at least the 13th century, notably to the Low Countries. Dutch towns were growing hops for their own brewers by about the 1360s, and immigrants from the Low Countries brought hopped "beer" to England, where it long remained a separate drink from traditional unhopped "ale".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruit1516: Bavaria limits beer to barley, hops and water
Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X of Bavaria, meeting the territorial diet at Ingolstadt in April 1516, decreed that beer be brewed only from barley, hops and water and fixed its prices; yeast was not mentioned. The rule extended a 1487 Munich ordinance, entered German imperial beer-tax law for bottom-fermented beer in 1906 and was first called the Reinheitsgebot ("purity order") in 1909; in 1987 the European Court of Justice barred its use against imported beer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot1553: Bavaria bans brewing in summer
Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria banned brewing between April 23 and September 29, mainly because beer fermented in warm weather often spoiled. Brewers made stronger beer in March and kept it cold in cellars through the summer, a practice the Oxford Companion to Beer credits with laying the groundwork for Bavarian lager and the Märzen style; the ban lasted until 1850.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A4rzen1720s: London brewers develop porter
Porter, a well-hopped brown beer aged at the brewery before sale and first mentioned in 1721, became by far London's most popular beer and one of the first brewed on an industrial scale, enriching brewers such as Whitbread, Truman and Thrale; within decades it was exported to Ireland, North America, the Baltic and India. The tale that the Shoreditch brewer Ralph Harwood invented it dates from 1788 and an influential 1802 London guidebook, and has no contemporary support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_(beer)1785: Whitbread's brewery installs a steam engine
Samuel Whitbread's porter brewery in London installed a rotative steam engine from Boulton and Watt to drive its malt mill, replacing a horse wheel. The engine remained in service for more than a century. Steam power, alongside instruments for measuring temperature and fermentable extract, helped breweries expand and standardize production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitbread_Engine1842: Groll brews a golden lager in Plzeň
At the new Burghers' Brewery in Plzeň, Bohemia, Bavarian brewer Josef Groll combined pale malt, soft local water and Saaz hops with bottom fermentation. The beer was first brewed in October and served in November. Its clear golden color and flavor became the model for the pilsner style, which spread internationally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilsner_Urquell1873: Spaten installs Linde's refrigeration machine
Carl Linde, an engineering professor in Munich, designed a vapor-compression refrigeration machine for keeping fermenting and maturing beer cold; the first, running on dimethyl ether, went into the Spaten brewery, which had helped fund it, in 1873, and he moved to ammonia in 1876. Mechanical cooling freed lager brewers from ice cut in winter, and by 1890 Linde's company had sold 747 machines to breweries and cold stores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Linde1876: Pasteur publishes his studies on beer
In "Études sur la bière" (Studies on Beer), Louis Pasteur described the "diseases" of beer, attributing souring and other spoilage to contaminating microorganisms, chiefly bacteria. The book built on his fermentation research from 1857, which showed that living yeast turns sugar into alcohol; heating to kill microbes, a method he had patented for wine in 1865, was soon applied to beer as pasteurization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur#Fermentation_and_germ_theory_of_diseases1883: Hansen isolates a pure lager yeast
At the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Emil Christian Hansen found that wild yeasts in brewers' pitching yeast, not only bacteria as Louis Pasteur had held, caused "beer sickness", and grew a pure culture of lager yeast from a single cell by repeated dilution. Carlsberg began brewing with it in November 1883 and gave it to other brewers free; Hansen later named it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis, now classed as Saccharomyces pastorianus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Christian_Hansen1892: Painter patents the crown cork
William Painter of Baltimore received patents on February 2, 1892, for a fluted metal cap lined with a thin cork disk that held bottled beer and soft drinks under carbonation pressure and was cheap enough to throw away after one use. His Crown Cork & Seal Company made the caps, and after the patents expired in 1909 the crown cap became ubiquitous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_cork1920: National Prohibition shuts American breweries
National Prohibition under the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January. The Volstead Act generally prohibited beverage alcohol containing 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or more, forcing American breweries to close or turn to near beer and other products. Restrictions elsewhere followed different paths: Iceland retained its ban on strong beer until March 1, 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States1933: Congress relegalizes 3.2 percent beer
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress on March 13 to legalize beer and tax it for revenue, the Cullen–Harrison Act allowed beer of 3.2% alcohol by weight to be sold from April 7, 1933, in states that permitted it. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed national Prohibition on December 5, 1933, leaving alcohol control to the states, some of which stayed dry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullen%E2%80%93Harrison_Act1935: Krueger sells the first canned beer
After a trial run among employees and friends in 1933, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey, working with the American Can Company, put canned Krueger's Cream Ale and Krueger's Finest Beer on sale in Richmond, Virginia, on January 24, 1935. Lined cans kept the metal from tainting the beer, and the Felinfoel Brewery in Wales began canning beer the same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Krueger_Brewing_Company1971: Drinkers found the Campaign for Real Ale
Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Jim Makin and Bill Mellor, opposed to the mass production of beer and the consolidation of British brewing, founded the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale on March 16, 1971, in a bar in Dunquin, County Kerry, Ireland. Renamed the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), it had 5,000 members by 1973 and campaigned for cask-conditioned beer, small brewers and traditional pubs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Real_Ale1976: McAuliffe founds New Albion Brewing in Sonoma
Jack McAuliffe, a homebrewer influenced by beer he drank while stationed in Scotland with the United States Navy and by Fritz Maytag's revival of San Francisco's Anchor Brewing from 1965, founded New Albion Brewing in Sonoma, California, with Suzy Stern and Jane Zimmerman in October 1976. Widely regarded as the first modern American microbrewery, it closed in 1982 but inspired the craft brewers who followed, helped by a 1978 federal law legalizing home brewing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Albion_Brewing_Company2003: China becomes the largest beer market
China became the world's largest beer-consuming country in 2003 and still ranked first in 2024, its 22nd year in a row, according to annual surveys by the Japanese brewer Kirin Holdings, which also show the Czech Republic leading in consumption per person since 1993. Modern lager brewing had reached China through foreign-founded breweries in Harbin in 1900 and in Qingdao, then a German leased territory, in 1903.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_in_China2011: Researchers identify lager yeast's wild parent
Diego Libkind and colleagues reported that a cold-tolerant yeast from southern beech forests in Patagonia, which they named Saccharomyces eubayanus, is 99.5% identical to the non-ale part of the lager yeast genome, identifying it as the wild species that hybridized with ale yeast to form Saccharomyces pastorianus. Strains found later in Tibet proved even closer, and whether the hybrid arose in Europe or Asia remains debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_eubayanus2016: AB InBev completes its takeover of SABMiller
Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), formed when the Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev bought Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis for US$52 billion in 2008, completed its purchase of SABMiller, founded as South African Breweries in Johannesburg in 1895, on October 10, 2016, for about US$107 billion. To win antitrust approval it sold SABMiller's stake in MillerCoors to Molson Coors and several European brands to Asahi; Euromonitor estimated the combined company's share of world beer sales at 28 percent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev2025: US brewery count falls as craft sales slip
The Brewers Association counted 9,724 breweries in the United States, compared with 9,922 a year earlier. It reported that small and independent brewers' volume sales fell 4 percent, while total US beer production and imports fell 5.7 percent. Craft brewers nevertheless increased their share of the shrinking market by volume to 13.4 percent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_beer#United_States