What is the Oldest Brewery in the World?

Many of those in the U.K. are partial to a tipple – so many, in fact, that drinks spending in the U.K. is expected to reach £50 billion in 2022. With around 19,000 beer brewing companies operating worldwide, it is safe to say there is a global taste for a good alcoholic beverage. But, with the humble beer as old as it in concept, what is the oldest brewery in the world at the moment?

The Beginning of Booze

The reason for the sheer popularity of beers, wines, spirits and shandies in the U.K., and indeed around the world, is difficult to directly define. Culture and history assuredly have a lot to do with it, and alcohol certainly has a lot of history to cover – around 12,000 years, as it happens. The earliest evidence we have found for alcoholic beverages in early human civilisation was reference to a honeyed beverage in 9,000BC, but with the beginnings of agriculture some 3,000 years prior, it is highly likely that alcohol had existed in some form for millennia already.

The History of Beer

As for beer itself, its proliferation in any recognisable sense can be attributed to the Sumerians, a ancient Mesopotamian civilisation that farmed grain, brewed barley and even worshipped the so-called ‘God of Beer’ Ninkasi. These barley-rich brews were the beginning of a nine-thousand-year-long brewing tradition, which has twisted and turned through cultures and upheaval to deliver us bittersweet pales, chocolatey stouts and everything in-between.

One of the biggest contributors to our modern iteration of beer was Germany, where evidence of brewing has been found from as far back as 800 B.C. German beer recalls crisp, light flavour, foamy head and clear brews, as the country remains best-known for its Pilseners, Helles lagers and Oktoberfest biers – but the reason for this ”purity”, which has influenced western brewing tradition for hundreds of years, lies in something called the Reinheitsgebot – a law which stipulated beer could only be brewed with four ingredients in order to salvage the bread industry in the 1500s.

The Oldest Working Brewery in the World

Germany’s coloured history with beer stretches back well before the Purity law, with abbey monks in the early centuries of the first millennium brewing beer for abbey consumption and sale and perfecting the craft in the process. One such abbey, the Weihenstephan Abbey, was dissolved in the early 1800s – however, its brewhouse remained, and continued to operate. Today, Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan is the oldest brewery in the world that is still in operation, the produce of which can be enjoyed worldwide.