Beer has been brewed in the Low Countries since early times. In the Middle Ages monasteries brewed it with gruit herbs, hops became usual only late in the period, and the first commercial brewers appeared with the growth of the towns in the 12th and 13th centuries; after the Reformation of the 1570s many monastery breweries vanished. In the Golden Age the Holland towns profited from world trade, and Amersfoort, Delft, Haarlem and Gouda became the main brewing towns, selling beer to northern German cities, today's Belgium and Britain. A litre of beer a day was normal in the 17th century, and children drank light beer. From about 1700 tea and coffee, and later jenever, displaced beer as the everyday drink, taxes made it dear in the 19th century, and the Dutch drank more beer than jenever again only from about 1960.

Modern industrial brewing began in the 19th century. Gerard Adriaan Heineken bought the Amsterdam brewery De Hooiberg in 1864 and Amstel was founded on the Mauritskade in 1870; older houses such as Grolsch (1615, Groenlo) and Brand of Wijlre (claimed since 1340, bought by the Brand family in 1871) grew into brands. About 180 breweries were active before the Second World War, some 80 afterwards and only 14 in 1980, as Heineken, which merged with Amstel in 1968, and the other big groups bought rivals and pilsener crowded out other styles. Oranjeboom of Rotterdam (1671) was taken over by Allied Breweries in 1967, and its last plant, in Breda, passed to Interbrew in 1995 and closed in 2004. Bavaria, the Swinkels family brewery of Lieshout, launched the first alcohol-free beer in 1978; it was renamed Swinkels Family Brewers in 2018 and became Royal Swinkels in 2019.

Two Trappist breweries stand in North Brabant: Koningshoeven at Berkel-Enschot, brewing since 1884 as La Trappe, which lost the Authentic Trappist Product logo on 1 December 1999 and regained it on 9 September 2005, and De Kievit of the Zundert abbey, which began in 2013. From the 1980s interest in speciality beer returned. Brouwerij 't IJ opened in a former bathhouse in Amsterdam in the 1980s (Duvel Moortgat took it over in 2015), and city brewpubs such as Oudaen in Utrecht (1990) and De Pelgrim in Rotterdam (1996) were among the first of a wave of small breweries, many of them run by one or two people, as social projects or as contract brewers.

By the count of Statistics Netherlands (CBS) the number of breweries grew from 75 in 2010 to 780 in early 2024, and North Brabant had the most (160), ahead of Noord-Holland (145). On 1 January 2025 there were 740, 40 fewer, the first fall since 2010. Consolidation goes on: Heineken took full ownership of the craft brewery Oedipus in 2023, Royal Swinkels owned all of De Molen of Bodegraven from 2019 and closed it in October 2025, Heineken announced in September 2022 that Brand would no longer be brewed at Wijlre, and Grolsch took over Gulpener in full in 2026. In 2004 about half of Dutch production (1,300 of 2,300 million litres) was exported, and Heineken remains the world's second-largest brewer.