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| 1726–1814 |  Spanish colony: San Felipe de Montevideo was founded by Spain in 1726 on the north bank of the Río de la Plata, and from 1776 the Banda Oriental belonged to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata |
| 1814–1821 |  Provincia Oriental del Río de la Plata, organised on 7 March 1814 as a province of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and from 1815 the core of Artigas's League of the Free Peoples (the Artigas flag); Portuguese-Brazilian troops took Montevideo on 20 January 1817 and Artigas was beaten at Tacuarembó in 1820 |
| 1821–1825 |  Estado Cisplatino (Cisplatina), incorporated on 31 July 1821 into the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves and, from 1822, part of the Empire of Brazil |
| 25 Aug 1825 | the Sala de Representantes of the Provincia Oriental, meeting at La Florida on 25 August 1825, declared it a sovereign state and part of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata; independence was recognised on 4 October 1828 and the name Estado Oriental del Uruguay approved on 7 May 1829 |
| 1825–1830 |  Provincia Oriental del Río de la Plata, declared a sovereign state and part of the United Provinces on 25 August 1825 (the flag of the Treinta y Tres); independence recognised on 4 October 1828 and the name Estado Oriental del Uruguay approved on 7 May 1829, until the first constitution of 1830 |
| 1830– |  Oriental Republic of Uruguay (República Oriental del Uruguay), first called Estado Oriental; the nine-stripe flag was fixed by the law of 11 July 1830 and the name República Oriental del Uruguay took effect with the constitution of 1918 on 1 March 1919 |
Beer reached Uruguay as an import, and the story of local brewing is mostly the story of one company. A book published by Fábricas Nacionales de Cerveza (FNC) in 2011 dates production to 1866, when Conrado Niding, a German from Hamburg, opened the Cervecería Popular in Palermo, a district of Montevideo; FNC still counts its age from that year and names Pilsen as its oldest beer. Niding sold the plant to Eduardo Richling in 1877, the Montevideana and the Nacional breweries rose in the 1890s, and by the 1920s the survivors, Uruguaya and Montevideana, had merged as Cervecerías del Uruguay.
In 1923 Numa Pesquera founded the Cervecería Oriental in the Atahualpa district. In the early 1930s the Oriental and Cervecerías del Uruguay merged into Fábricas Nacionales de Cerveza (the book gives 1932, another source May 1933), centred on the old Nacional plant in Arroyo Seco, which still brews. A rival came from the Salus company, which bottled the mineral water of Minas and brewed with it a beer sold as Serrana from 1936 and renamed Patricia in 1956 (one source dates Patricia itself to 1937). In 1947 the Cervecería y Maltería Paysandú launched Norteña, and from 1966 it backed Paysandú's Semana de la Cerveza, still the city's main festival. FNC passed to the Bemberg group, the owner of Quilmes in Argentina, in the 1950s.
In 2000 three companies shared the market: Pilsen had 52%, Norteña 24.5% and Patricia 23.5%. Then everything was bought within three years. In 2000 Brazil's AmBev and Danone took 57% of Salus; in late November 2000 (2001 in another account) AmBev bought 95.3% of the Paysandú company for about US$46 million; and when AmBev absorbed Quilmes in 2002-03 it gained FNC. Norteña has been brewed by FNC since 2003 at the latest, and sources put the end of brewing at Paysandú between the late 1990s and 2003. The Paysandú malt house stayed with AmBev and halted for two months in March 2026. Today FNC brews Pilsen, Patricia, Norteña and Zillertal and is the only industrial brewer.
The craft scene began after a trip: in September 2006 the engineer Wilfredo Camacho tasted the beers of General Belgrano in Córdoba, and in October 2007 his Mastra put three ales on the market, calling itself the first Uruguayan craft beer; Good Beer Hunting adds that a few brewers had tried in the late 1990s and early 2000s and failed. Davok followed in January 2008 and Cabesas Bier in Tacuarembó at about the same time. By 2016 some 17 breweries and 27 brands were selling; the craft boom of 2016-17 came as beer production reached a record 108 million litres in 2018, and craft demand rose an estimated 24% in 2019. Volcánica of Canelones, working since 2014, was planning in 2025 a tourist brewery at Parque del Plata worth over US$1 million, and the Montevideo brewpub Malafama became the fourth-largest craft brewer and the first to can.
Imports have changed the market: they were 3% of consumption in 2010, 17% in 2015, a third in 2020 and 48.3% in 2024, when domestic output fell to 508,000 hl, its lowest since 2002; in 2025 imported beer passed domestic for the first time. FNC announced the closure of its Minas plant on 10 May 2024 but kept it open with a workforce cut by 40%; by August 2026 the 59 workers there were on unemployment insurance, and the company said brewing in Uruguay cost twice as much as in Argentina or Brazil. On 20 October 2026 it signed an agreement with its union to move the Minas staff to Montevideo, where production is now concentrated.
