“Who brewed the first beer in America” sounds like it should have one clean answer, and it does not. There is a real 1587 account of colonists brewing beer from corn on Roanoke Island, more than two decades before the more commonly cited 1612 date for the first actual brewery. Neither is the beginning of a straight line to today’s industry, which really starts with home and tavern brewing scattered across the colonies for two more centuries before anything resembling a modern commercial brewery existed. Here is what the record actually shows, in order.
First Beer in America at a Glance
| Earliest documented brewing | 1587, Roanoke Island (corn-malt ale) |
| First known brewery | 1612, New Amsterdam (Manhattan) |
| Oldest brewery still operating | Yuengling, founded 1829, Pottsville, PA |
| Key colonial home brewers | Thomas Jefferson, George Washington |
1587: Beer From Corn on Roanoke Island
The earliest documented beer brewing by Europeans in what is now the United States happened not in Jamestown, but at the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony in present-day North Carolina. Scientist Thomas Harriot, who traveled with the 1587 expedition, wrote that the colonists took “pagatowr,” the local Algonquian word for maize, from the Secotan people and used it to make malt.
“We made of the same in the country some malt, whereof was brewed as good ale as was to be desired.”, Thomas Harriot, 1588 account of the Roanoke colony
That makes it beer brewed with a New World grain the colonists had never worked with before, using techniques adapted on the spot rather than shipped-over recipes. The Roanoke colony itself famously vanished without a clear explanation a few years later, which is part of why this beer-brewing detail gets far less attention than it probably deserves.
1612: The First Actual Brewery
The first documented commercial brewery on the North American continent came 25 years later and further north. Around 1612, Dutch colonists Adrian Block and Hans Christiansen built a brewery as part of a small fort on the southern tip of Manhattan, in what was then New Amsterdam and would later become New York. It was a modest operation housed in a log structure, and it stayed in business for roughly 20 years before closing around 1632, but it represents the real starting point most beer historians point to when asked where American commercial brewing began, brewed in the European style with hops and malted barley rather than the improvised corn-malt approach at Roanoke.
The Colonial Gap: Home Brewing, Not Commercial Brewing
For most of the 150 years after 1612, American beer production was overwhelmingly a household task, not an industry. Thomas Jefferson’s wife Martha brewed 15-gallon batches of small beer, a low-alcohol style, roughly every two weeks in the early years of their marriage at Monticello, and later Jefferson himself experimented further with malt liquor on the estate, reportedly buying hops from enslaved people on nearby plantations who grew or gathered them separately.
George Washington wrote down his own recipe “To Make Small Beer” around 1757, while serving as a 25-year-old colonel in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, though historians note he generally relied on others to actually brew it rather than doing it himself.
Small beer’s appeal in this period was practical as much as social: it was weak enough to drink through the day, including by workers and sometimes children, in an era when water quality was often unreliable.
1829: The Brewery That Is Still Running Today
The direct line from colonial brewing to the modern American beer industry really starts in 1829, when David G. Yuengling opened the Eagle Brewery in the Pennsylvania coal town of Pottsville. Unlike the New Amsterdam brewery two centuries earlier, Yuengling never closed. It survived Prohibition by switching to near-beer (about 0.5% alcohol) and ice cream production through the Yuengling Dairy, then went straight back to full-strength brewing the moment the law changed, and it remains the oldest continuously operating brewery in the United States, still owned by the same family, seven generations later.
A Rough Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1587 | Roanoke Island colonists brew beer from corn malt, the earliest documented European brewing in what is now the US |
| 1612 | Adrian Block and Hans Christiansen build the first known brewery, in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) |
| 1632 | That New Amsterdam brewery closes after roughly 20 years |
| 1650s-1770s | Beer production is dominated by home and tavern brewing across the colonies, including at Mount Vernon and Monticello |
| 1829 | David G. Yuengling opens the Eagle Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, still operating today |
Curious how the industry evolved from there? See our history of Guinness for how a similar family-run brewery on the other side of the Atlantic scaled up over the same general era.
FAQs
What was the very first beer brewed in America?
The earliest documented account is from 1587, when Roanoke Island colonists brewed ale from corn malt, using a New World grain rather than the barley used in Europe at the time.
What was the first actual brewery in America?
The first known commercial brewery was built around 1612 by Dutch colonists Adrian Block and Hans Christiansen on the southern tip of Manhattan, then part of New Amsterdam.
What is the oldest brewery still operating in the US today?
D.G. Yuengling and Son, founded in 1829 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and still owned and operated by the Yuengling family, is the oldest continuously operating brewery in the country.
