Sprouted grain and drinking cups found at Archontiko near Giannitsa and at Argissa in Thessaly show that beer was brewed in northern Greece in the Early Bronze Age, about 2100 BC. The Greeks of classical times drank wine, though, and knew beer (zythos) as the drink of the Thracians, the Egyptians and other foreigners.
Modern brewing came with King Otto, a Bavarian prince, after 1832: small breweries worked for his Bavarian officials and soldiers in the 1840s, and in 1864 Karl (Charles) Johann Fuchs founded the Fix brewery in Athens. As purveyor to the royal court Fix held the Greek market almost alone for about a hundred years; other German brewers opened smaller breweries.
The monopoly ended in the 1960s. The Athenian Brewery, founded in 1963 with Amstel behind it, began brewing Amstel in Athens in 1965 and, as part of Heineken, became the largest brewer in Greece. Henninger came to Sindos by Thessaloniki about 1970 and Löwenbräu to Atalanti at the end of the 1980s. Fix lost its market, and its brewery on Syngrou Avenue closed in 1982–1983.
The 1990s brought Greek beers with Greek names: Mythos (1997) of the Boutari group, from the old Henninger brewery at Sindos, and Vergina (1998) of the Macedonian Thrace Brewery in Komotini; the Atalanti brewery became the Greek-owned EZA in 1998. Fix came back in 2010 from the new Olympic Brewery at Ritsona on Evia, which Carlsberg joined with Mythos in 2014–2015.
The first microbrewery, Craft in Athens, opened about 1997; Septem on Evia, Corfu Beer and the breweries of Chios, Santorini, Crete and other islands followed. Their number grew through the debt crisis: Greece had 28 breweries in 2015, 46 in 2018 and about 76 in 2026. A Greek drinks about 36 (2018) to 41 (2024) litres of beer a year, among the lowest figures in the EU.
