The old drinks of Korea were rice wines and soju. Beer came with Japanese traders and settlers after the treaty of 1876, and Kirin was sold in Korea from 1905. A liquor tax law came in 1909, and the Liquor Tax Act of 1916 ended home distilling, while beer sales grew fast; beer was a luxury of upper-class men, and in the 1930s three and a half cases cost as much as a 144 kg sack of rice. It is often said that the first small brewery in Seoul opened in 1908, but no source confirms it.

Brewing on a large scale began in 1933 at Yeongdeungpo, then a town outside Seoul. The Chosun Brewery was founded there on 9 August 1933 by Japan's Dai Nippon Brewery and made Crown Beer; Showa Kirin Brewery, the forerunner of Oriental Brewery (OB), finished its plant four months later. After 1945 both were taken over by the authorities, and in 1952 they went to private owners: Chosun kept its name and Crown, and the Kirin plant became Tongyang Brewery of the Doosan group, brewing OB. Chosun supplied the UN forces in Korea from 1954 and made the first Korean beer export in March 1962. OB brewed Heineken under licence from 1981 and Budweiser from 1987; imports were legalised in 1984. OB led the market for some 30 years, until Hite, launched by Chosun in 1993, took the lead in 1996.

The 1990s brought a third brewer and big moves. Jinro and the American Coors formed Jinro-Coors in 1992 and launched Cass in 1994. OB left Yeongdeungpo for a new plant at Icheon in 1997, the year Chosun opened its Gangwon plant at Hongcheon (300,000 kl in the first stage) and stopped Yeongdeungpo; it became Hite Brewery in 1998. Doosan sold OB to the Belgian Interbrew in steps between 1998 and 2001, and in December 1999 OB won the bidding for Jinro-Coors, then in court receivership, at 480 billion won, renamed it Cass Brewery and merged it in March 2001. AB InBev sold OB to KKR for 1.8 billion USD in 2009 and bought it back for 5.8 billion in 2014. Hite lost the lead to Cass in 2012. Hite had meanwhile bought the soju maker Jinro, and the two merged as HiteJinro on 1 September 2011. A third rival came in April 2014, when Lotte launched the all-malt Kloud; a new brewery at Chungju, ready in mid-2017, raised its capacity to two million hl a year.

Small brewers were held back by the rules. From 2002 brewpubs of 60-300 kl could sell their own beer, and in 2014 the minimum size fell to 50 kl and beer could leave the pub. Craftworks Taphouse opened in 2010, 7Bräu began brewing in 2011, Magpie in 2012, and The Booth began as a pizza pub in Gyeongnidan in 2013. Korea Craft Brewery of Eumseong, built with Japan's Kiuchi (Hitachino Nest), was finished in July 2014 and opened its ARK line in December. Jeju Beer (2015) grew to 28.4% of craft sales by 2020 and listed on KOSDAQ in May 2021, but the craft market, 152 billion won in 2021, fell to 75.2 billion in 2023; its main shareholder changed twice in 2024, and in April 2025 it was renamed Hanul & Jeju.

HiteJinro launched Terra in 2019 and Kelly in March 2023; Nielsen put Cass at 43% of the beer market in January 2023. In September 2024 OB agreed to buy Jeju Soju, and in October 2026 HiteJinro announced that it now brews Kirin Ichiban under licence at its Jeonju plant.