Circa 2000 to 1500 B.C.
Germanic and Celtic tribal brewsters start making ale from wheat and barley in northern Europe.

Circa 800 B.C.
A German gentleman is buried with crocks of black beer, the first archaeological evidence of German beer making.

Circa 450 B.C.
The beer-hating Romans first encounter the beer-loving Germans.

A.D. 98
The Roman historian Tacitus ridicules German beer and German drinking habits in his works—the best preserved written records of early German beer culture.

Circa 450
Ale-drinking Germanic hordes plunder and pillage along the Apennine Peninsula, and the decaying Roman Empire collapses.

Circa 500
Hausfrau brewsters continue the German beer tradition in their tribal homes.

Circa 780
Charlemagne regulates brewing and starts estate breweries, and monks cultivate the first hops near Munich and start monastic breweries. This is the beginning of professional large-scale brewing in Germany.

Circa 900
The Catholic Church secures a virtual beer monopoly from the feudal lords.

924
King Henry I of Germany coins the word "burgher" and with it identifies a new social class that will ultimately challenge the brew monopoly of the nobles and the clergy.

962
The First German Reich (empire) is founded by Otto I.

Circa 1000
Brewmonks and brewnuns make great ales and get very rich as a result.

Circa 1200
Feudal lords build court breweries (Hofbrduhduser), mostly in the south, to spite the monks, and burghers build private city breweries mostly in the north, to spite both. As a result, Bavarian beers take a turn for the worse, despite regulation, while northern beers take a turn for the better.

Circa 1250
The Hanseatic League starts a trading empire for northern German ales. The rigid horse collar and the iron horseshoe make overland beer transport possible. The city of Einbeck starts making an ale-style bock beer.

1288
The Battle of Worringen and the founding of Diisseldorf lay the foundations for the future development of malt beer, Germany's copper-colored traditional ale.

1438
The founding of Cologne's brewers' guild places the brewing of the local ale, a forerunner of today's kölsch, firmly in the hands of free-enterprise-loving burghers.

1516
The Bavarian beer purity law (Reinheitsgebot) is proclaimed. It is the oldest food quality law in Germany—and perhaps the world. It stipulates that only barley, water, and hops may be used in beer making.

1517
Luther nails his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg and starts the Reformation. Beer from Einbeck sustains him.

1526
The 531 breweries in Hamburg employ half the city's population.

1553
Summer brewing is outlawed in Bavaria. As a result of brewing only in winter, Bavarians start making lagers without knowing it.

1566
The ducal Bavarian House of Wittelsbach outlaws wheat-beer making to curb the revenues from the wheat-beer monopoly enjoyed by the House of Degenberg and to secure a popular market for the new lagers made according to the Reinheitsgebot.

1572
By some accounts, Berlin brewers start to make an effervescent, very dry wheat ale. Supposedly an adaptation of a Bohemian brew, they call theirs Berliner weisse. (Other chroniclers date the beginning of the Berliner brew a century later, to the 1680s.)

1589-1590
Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, grandson of the Reinheitsgebot duke Wilhelm IV, builds the first Hofbrduhaus in Munich, on the site of the present Hofbrduhaus. He dedicates it to the exclusive brewing of a brown Reinheitsgebot lager, the forerunner of all modern Bavarian lagers.

1602
The line of Degenbergers dies out, the wheat-beer monopoly reverts to the House of Wittelsbach, and wheat beer becomes legal again in Bavaria. Duke Maximilian I, great-grandson of the Reinheitsgebot duke Wilhelm IV, builds a second Hofbrduhaus in Munich for wheat beer only next to the existing brown-lager brewery.

1603
Lager brewing is outlawed in Cologne to defend the local kölsch ale against a wave of lager brewing spreading north from southern Germany.

1606
Libavius theorizes that there is a difference between fermentation and putrefaction. He thus opens the door to the scientific study of fermentation.

1612
Bock beer, a lager copy of the original Einbeck ale, as well as wheat beer conquer Bavaria. The two beers are supported by edicts from the House of Wittelsbach to secure the ducal markets and—burdened by taxes—to secure the ducal riches.

1618
Start of the Thirty Years' War, which ruins the northern German brew industry and causes the collapse of the merchant beer-trading empire there. As a result, northern beer making stagnates while Bavarian lager-beer making takes the lead in quality and innovation. Only in the Rhineland do traditional German ales develop into distinct styles that survive to the present as Diisseldorf alt and Cologne kölsch.

1674
Van Leeuwenhoek discovers the existence of yeast.

1706
Proclamation of the Diisseldorf beer purity law ensures the integrity and purity of ales from the Rhineland.

1780
The first commercial doppelbock is brewed by the Paulaner monks of Munich, who name it Salvator.

1789
Lavoisier discovers that carbon dioxide and ethanol are products of alcoholic fermentation. The French Revolution spawns the liberalization of all facets of society in most of Europe, including the brew laws in Germany.

1791
The French abolish occupational guilds. This puts an end to German brewers' guilds as the French army rolls over Europe.

1803
Beer-selling monopolies are abolished in French-occupied northern Germany.

1806
The First German Empire ceases to exist after the last incumbent abdicates the throne in the face of rising French power in Europe. More than eight centuries of German political and brewing history come to an end. Beer-selling monopolies are abolished in Bavaria.

1809
The French army under Napoleon occupies Berlin. They encounter the bubbly Berliner weisse wheat ale and dub it the "Champagne of the north."

1810
First Munich Oktoberfest on the occasion of the marriage between the Bavarian crown prince Ludwig I and Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen.

1818
Invention of the hot-air kiln, which is fired by indirect heat. This makes the production of pale malts and of pale beers possible.

1837
Schwann discovers that yeast is a living organism and that the fermentation of sugars into alcohol is an anaerobic process.

1841
Vienna brewer Anton Dreher and Munich brewer Gabriel Sedlmayr introduce a Vienna, or Marzen lager, which later becomes known as Oktoberfest beer.

1842
An immigrant brewer from Bavaria creates the first Pilsner Urquell in Bohemia, the first successful blonde lager and the mother of all modern lagers.

1843
Balling invents the hydrometer, which allows brewers to measure the extract strength of beer and thus make a more consistent product.

Circa 1850
Steam-heated brew kettles and mash tuns make their appearance first in Bavaria, then in the rest of Germany.

I860
German immigrant Eberhard Anheuser starts a small brewery in St. Louis, Missouri, which, in due course, becomes the biggest brewery in the world. Its flagship product, Budweiser, is an imitation of a Bohemian lager.

1868
Pasteur publishes his Etudes sur la biere, in which he explains the reproduction and metabolism of yeast. He also explains how bacteria can spoil beer unless they are killed by heat (pasteurization).

1871
Bismarck founds the Second German Empire under Prussian leadership. Beer taxes and beer quality standards are part of the legal code of the new empire. The Spaten Brewery introduces the Vienna/Marzen lager to the Oktoberfest in Munich, and the beer acquires its new name of Oktoberfestbier.

1872
The Bavarian House of Wittelsbach sells the wheat beer privilege to a private brewing company and thus end two and a half centuries of royal production monopolies in wheat beers.

1873
Linde invents refrigeration. Munich brewmaster Sedlmayr of the Spaten Brewery is the first to use it. Lagers can now be made anywhere, regardless of climate. Subsequently, lager beers sweep Europe (except for the Rhineland, Belgium, Holland, and the British Isles).

1878
Enzinger invents the beer filter.

1880
The number of German breweries reaches its peak of nineteen thousand. (Today, there are about twelve hundred.)

1881
Hansen isolates ale and lager yeast strains for the first time. Now brewers can work with pure yeast strains and make beers with predictable characteristics.

1890
O'Sullivan explains how enzymes convert unfermentable starches into fermentable sugars, and the mashing process is demystified. That same year, according to legend, eisbock is discovered by accident, when a brewery apprentice leaves several casks of fermented bock to freeze overnight.

1894
The Spaten Brewery makes the first blonde, clear, golden lager in Bavaria, a forerunner of the helles that ended the dominance of the traditional Bavarian brown lagers.

Circa 1900
Germany has become an international beer power. Every fourth glass of beer consumed in the world is made in Germany.

1906
The Reinheitsgebot becomes the official law in all the realm of the Kaiser.

1919
The end of the Second German Empire after the devastation of the First World War. The beginning of Germany's first attempt at democracy, the Weimar Republic, with its idealistic yet unworkable constitution, is formed.

1928
The Paulaner Brewery of Munich makes a helles that helps launch the blonde quaffing lager of Bavaria as the most popular beer style in Germany.

1933
The end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third German Empire, the Third Reich.

1945
The end of the Second World War and of the Third Reich.

1949
Germany's second attempt at a democratic republic, the still-existing Federal Republic.

Circa 1960
The hoppy, dry north German Pils takes almost 60% of the German beer market.

Circa 1980
With the resurgence in popularity of wheat beers from Bavaria, and of alt and kolsch from the Rhineland, ales rebound in the German marketplace and reach a combined share of almost one-fifth in some regions.

1987
The European Court strikes down the German Reinheitsgebot as an obstacle to free trade, although German brewers and drinkers continue to adhere to it to this day.

In the 1990s
Brewery mergers and closings as well as national beer conglomerates occur in the face of growing competition and declining beer consumption in Germany, but small brewpubs increase in numbers and popularity.