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| 1867–1918 |  Kingdom of Hungary (Magyar Királyság) within Austria-Hungary, the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen (Transleithania), from the Compromise of 1867 that set up the Dual Monarchy until 16 November 1918; the red-white-green tricolour became the official flag after the Compromise, with the lesser arms of Hungary as a badge until 1918 |
| 1920–1946 | Hungarian State (Magyar Állam), the Kingdom of Hungary governed by a regent: the law of 29 February 1920 restored the constitutional order and the word "royal" came back into legal acts on 18 March 1920; until the Hungarian Republic of 31 January 1946; the tricolour with or without the lesser arms |
| 1946–1949 | Hungarian Republic (Magyar Köztársaság), established by the law of 31 January 1946; the crown was dropped from the arms that served as the badge on the tricolour |
| 1949–1989 | Hungarian People's Republic (Magyar Népköztársaság), under the Constitution of 20 August 1949 until 23 October 1989; the tricolour carried the arms with a red star as its badge at first, and has been plain since 1957 |
| 23 Oct 1989 | the Hungarian People's Republic became the Hungarian Republic (Magyar Köztársaság) by the law amending the Constitution passed on 18 October 1989 and in force from 23 October 1989; the years 1867-1989 are listed as periods, and the red-white-green tricolour of all of them is the one flag of the country |
| 1989–2012 | Hungarian Republic (Magyar Köztársaság), the name from the constitutional amendment in force on 23 October 1989 until 31 December 2011; the plain tricolour, confirmed by the flag law of 1990 |
| 2012– | Hungary (Magyarország) under the Fundamental Law adopted on 18 April 2011 and in force from 1 January 2012; the red-white-green tricolour |
Hungary is usually seen as a wine country, but its towns have brewed beer for a long time. From the 14th century Buda and Pest had communal brewhouses where citizens whose houses carried a brewing right took turns, and from the 15th century the guild controlled the trade. In 1703 the Privilege of the Two Cities gave Buda and Pest the sole right to run brewhouses, which they leased to guild brewers. The guild lost its privileges in 1843: anyone who paid the beer duty could then open a brewery. In 1844 Péter Schmidt, who had learned brewing in Munich under Gabriel Sedlmayr, began bottom-fermented brewing on Üllői út in Pest and matured the beer in the limestone cellars of Kőbánya, the old quarry district, so that it was sold as Kőbánya beer.
Kőbánya became the centre of lager brewing in the Dual Monarchy. The first large steam brewery there, built by August Barber and Károly Klusemann, started in January 1854 and became the First Hungarian Share-Company Brewery in 1867. Dreher dates its Kőbánya brewery to 1854 and to the purchase by Anton Dreher of Vienna in 1862; Peter Dyer in Brewery History describes the 1854 works and the one Dreher bought as two breweries. Under his son Anton Dreher Jr., in charge from 1870, it became the largest in the country, with about half a million hectolitres by 1900. When phylloxera ruined the vineyards in the 1880s and 1890s drinkers turned to beer, and new breweries opened: Pécs (1848, Leopold Hirschfeld), Nagykanizsa (1892) and Sopron (March 1895, with investors from the Brno brewery). In 1886-87 Hungary had 109 breweries making 630,998 hectolitres.
After the First World War and the break-up of the monarchy only a handful of breweries survived. Jenő Dreher merged the Kőbánya works in 1923, bought Nagykanizsa in 1928 and Fővárosi in 1935, and held about three quarters of the market. Dreher and the other firms with more than 100 workers were nationalised in 1948, and in 1949 the state company Kőbányai Sörgyárak took over the plants. A new brewery replaced Nagykanizsa in 1956, the state brewery company MOSV followed in 1959, and Borsodi at Bőcs began brewing in 1973. Komárom (1983, brewing from 1988) and Martfű (1985) joined them, foreign beers were brewed under licence (Holsten at Nagykanizsa from 1984, Austrian brands at Sopron from 1988), and a Kaltenberg brewpub opened in Budapest in 1985. The Dreher brand was relaunched in 1987, and consumption reached about 100 litres a head in the 1980s, the highest it has been.
The seven breweries became share companies in July 1992 and were sold to foreign groups. South African Breweries bought Kőbánya in November 1993, with the Dreher name from the family; Interbrew took Borsodi (1991 or 1993, sources differ), the Austrian BBAG (later Brau Union) Sopron and Martfű, Heineken Komárom, and Ottakringer a large stake in Pécs. Nagykanizsa went to SAB in 1994 and stopped brewing in 1999 (some sources say 2002). Heineken bought Brau Union in 2003, Komárom stopped brewing in 2004 and Martfű in 2018, leaving Sopron. Borsodi passed to CVC (StarBev) in 2009 and to Molson Coors in 2012; SABMiller, which had absorbed SAB in 2002, sold Dreher to Asahi in 2017; Ottakringer sold Pécs to Hungarian investors the same year. After 1989 the tax-free microbreweries multiplied, 360 to 420 of them by 1993 with up to a fifth of the market, but by 1996 only 60 to 260 were left.
Craft beer came back with the first Főzdefeszt in Budapest in May 2011. Monyó, Mad Scientist and Horizont were among the pioneers, followed by Hedon (2014), Fehér Nyúl (2017) and others, and the Association of Craft Breweries (KSE) speaks for the small brewers. Small breweries still hold only 3 to 5 percent of the market, and more than half of their output comes from the Pécs brewery. In 2025 the big brewers' domestic sales fell 9.3 percent to 503 million litres; premium beers took 25 percent, alcohol-free beers 7 percent. At Kőbánya Dreher is carrying out a HUF 100 billion programme whose first phase, HUF 30 billion, brought 35 new fermentation tanks in October-November 2025 and is due to finish at the end of 2026. Soproni marked 130 years on 6 June 2025, and on 3 July 2025 Horizont's IPA was unveiled as the public-vote Nation's Beer.
