The Gauls drank cervoise (cervesia), a beer without hops, and charred barley found at Roquepertuse in Provence points to malting there as early as about 500 BC. In the Middle Ages monks developed the use of hops, and in 1268 Louis IX fixed the statutes of the Paris brewers' guild. It is often said that the Gauls invented the wooden barrel to ferment and store cervoise, but no source consulted here confirms it. Before industrialisation beer came from small rural breweries, some 3,000 of them around 1900 according to Brasseurs de France.

In the 19th century beer became an industry in the east. Schiltigheim beside Strasbourg was the "city of brewers": from the 1860s about half of Strasbourg's beer was made there, and one Alsatian brewery in five stood in the town. L'Espérance (founded in Strasbourg in 1746) moved there in 1862 and Fischer (1821) in 1884. Kronenbourg dates itself from 9 June 1664, when Jérôme Hatt took over the Canon brewery in Strasbourg; it moved to the Cronenbourg quarter in 1862. After Alsace-Moselle passed to Germany in 1871, Alsatian brewers moved to Paris, where Gallia, Karcher, Demory and others used old quarries as cellars. In the north the farm breweries of French Flanders kept the bière de garde, a top-fermented beer matured in the bottle; Jenlain, Trois Monts, Ch'ti and La Choulette are its best-known brands.

The 20th century thinned the field. Industrialisation, the decline of the northern coal mines and two world wars emptied the countryside, and by the 1980s only about thirty breweries were left. The survivors merged. Kronenbourg opened its K2 plant at Obernai in 1969, joined BSN (later Danone) in 1970, launched Kronenbourg 1664 in 1952 (named after the founding year) and merged with the Société européenne de brasserie in 1986. It was sold to Scottish & Newcastle in 2000, closed its Rennes brewery in 2003, sold Champigneulles in 2006 and has belonged to Carlsberg since 2008. Heineken arrived in 1972 with the Alsatian group Albra, bought Pelforth's parent Française de Brasserie in 1988 and became the majority owner of the Fischer-Adelshoffen group on 12 February 1996; it closed Mutzig (1989), Adelshoffen (2000) and Fischer (2009).

A revival began in the 1980s. Coreff opened at Morlaix in 1985 as the Brasserie des Deux Rivières, brewing real ale with the help of Peter Austin of England's Ringwood Brewery; it moved to Carhaix in 2005 and is considered France's first microbrewery. In the north Brasserie de Saint-Omer (1866), taken over in 1986 by André Pecqueur, grew into the largest independent group in the country with 5.5 million hl and about 800 staff in 2026. The count of breweries went from about thirty in the 1980s to about 1,100 at the end of 2017 and 2,500 in 2021, 92% of them under 1,000 hl a year; in 2018 a brewery opened every day.

Today the market is flat and the number of breweries is slowly falling. Beer sales fell about 7% between 2022 and 2024; in 2025 home consumption rose 1.2% and on-trade volume fell about 1.5% (Brasseurs de France, 3 February 2026). The sector counts 2,500 breweries, 96% of them small companies: 209 closed and 213 opened in 2025, after more closures than openings in 2024. Non-alcoholic beer grew 11.5% and makes almost 6% of supermarket volume. In Alsace, Heineken announced on 14 November 2022 that it would close L'Espérance at Schiltigheim; the last brew was in autumn 2025, Heineken announced on 29 April 2025 that the Fischer range would be brewed under contract by Meteor at Hochfelden from January 2026, and the brewhouse was protected as a historic monument on 13 April 2026. Kronenbourg at Obernai remains the largest brewery, with a little over 30% of the French market.