headdesk I lost my original comment when I closed the wrong tab, so let's try this again.

Beer being produced and available globally is a recent thing.

In Japan, beer was first brewed by foreigners for foreigners, although the Japanese elite quickly jumped on that bandwagon. The first brewery in Japan was founded by a Norwegian-American in 1869 or 1870 in Yokohama:

Although imported beer was plentiful, some Westerners in Yokohama were determined to brew beer locally and thus undercut the market for expensive foreign brands. The most famous among them was William Copeland. Born Johan Martinius Theresen in Norway in 1834, he changed his name when immigrated to America as a young man. Copeland then moved to Yokohama in 1864 and set himself up as a brewer in 1869, making his story one of the first detailed accounts that we have a foreigner who founded and managed his own company in Japan. According to Copeland's signed "Brewery Company" business plan, he first worked for five years during the late 1840s as an apprentice to a German brewmaster in Norway. He married his first wife there, but when exactly she died is unclear. After completing his apprenticeship, Copeland moved to America in the 1850s, where he eventually became a naturalized American citizen. He was thus always treated as an American while in Japan. According to Yokohama's English-language paper, the Japan Weekly Mail, Copeland started out the cartage business along Yokohama's wharf before trying his hand in the city's burgeoning dairy industry. Due to his early presence in the city, his name appears in The Written History of Yokohama City in a list of Americans and Europeans living there in 1868, at the very beginning of the Meiji era.

Copeland settled in Yamate's Kiyoizumi area, next to Amanuma Pond, which was the site of a natural spring. It was there in 1869 or 1870, at the age of thirty-six, that he founded his new company, naming it the Spring Valley Brewery (Izumi no tani). On both his labels and in his personal letters, Copeland always included the address "No. 123 Bluff, Yokohama", and though he did not use the name Amanuma, his product was known locally as Amanuma biyazake or "Amanuma beer sake". In The Written History of Yokohama City, the authors note, "Indeed, Amanuma biyazake is certainly one thing that the British officers and men stationed at the nearby Teppoba training grounds (a rifle range in modern Yamate-cho), as well as the foreign residents of Yokohama count as indispensable." At that time, the bulk of the beer consumed in Japan consisted of foreign brands, and Amanuma beer was pitted against imports like "Bass Ale" and "Bass Stout", as well as German brands. Copeland's three brands, "Lager Beer," "Bavarian Beer," and "Bavarian Bock Beer," were sold principally in casks to Yokohama taverns and beer halls, but he also sold a small amount of bottled beer to foreigners living throughout Yamate and Yamashita-machi.

Copeland sold his factory to Japan Brewing Company, which still produces beer today under the name Kirin Company, Ltd.

In China, the situation is slightly different. Beer may have been brewed as early as the Shang Dynasty (c 16001000 BCE), although we might not recognize it as beer today, but was rarely found by the Han Dynasty (206 BCE220 CE). The recipe is roughly translated as:

The Yellow Emperor asks: How does one turn grain mash into laoli (beer)?

Qi Bo answers: The mash must be of rice, and cooked using rice straw as fuel.

The first modern brewery was founded by a Polish-Russian in 1900 in Harbin:

The first brewery in China, Ulubulevskij Brewery (present-day Harbin Brewery) was established in Harbin in 1900 and named after its Russian founder of Polish origin. Contemporary observers remarked that the Northeast had several advantages for the manufacture of beer--cheap coal and labour and abundant high-quality water. But there were also major drawbacks: although hop cultivation was begun by Russian farmers in 1918, the importation of hops from Czechoslovakia and Germany remained necessary; breweries in Fengtian, for example used German products exclusively... But despite such challenges, Harbin became one of the major centres for the production of alcohol in the Northeast and one of the biggest markets for beer in China. Incredibly, less than ten year after their founding, Harbin's breweries produced over 1 million bottles of beer annually...Reflecting Harbin's multicultural nature, in the first years of the twentieth century, over twenty factories producing alcohol were opened by Chinese, Czechs, Germans, Greeks, Japanese, Polish, Russians, and other ethnic groups. Migrants, expanding urban centres, and a burgeoning middle class all contributed to growth in the industry.

Even outside Asia, beer was not universal. In the turn of the last century, there was a cultural divide between beer-drinkers and, well, the rest of America.

That the proliferation of saloons was abetted by immigrants (usually German or Bohemian), largely for immigrants (members of those nationalities, but also Irish, Slavs, Scandinavians, and many, many others), was not lost on the moralists of the WCTU and other temperance organizations. As early as 1876 Frances Willard had referred in a speech to "the infidel foreign population of our country." Near the end of her career, Willard called on Congress to pass immigration restrictions to keep out "the scum of the Old World." In the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges of norther Minnesota, congressional investigators counted 256 saloons in fifteen mining towns, their owners representing eighteen distinct immigrant nationalities.

It wasn't until WWII that beer gained acceptance across large swaths of American. During the First World War, brewers such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Pabst were sneered at as "foreign enterprises". Attitudes remained cool throughout Prohibition and even after the repeal of the 18th amendment. By the start of the Second, the federal government authorized draft boards to grant deferments to brewery workers, so that they could produce and ship beer, along with its nutritious Vitamin B content, to soldiers overseas. A lot of soldiers were exposed to beer for the first time, and developed a taste for the cheap, watery stuff being pumped out, growing consumption from 55.2 million barrels in 1941, to 188.4 million barrels in 1980.

Beer had become mainstream.

SOURCES:

• Alexander, Jeffrey. Brewed in Japan: The Evolution of the Japanese Beer Industry. UBC Press, 2013.

• The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon of Medicine

• Smith, Norman. Intoxicating Manchuria: Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China's Northeast. UBC Press, 2012.

• Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Simon and Schuster, 2010.

• United States Brewers Association, 1993 Brewers Almanac, Washington, DC: 7-8.

As far as I remember from the sparse academic sources and anthropological evidence from the museums I've visited, beer has been around since the Neolithic revolution some 10 000 years ago. Before the European age of discovery (1450s-1648) there were many regional 'beer cultures', the most significant of which existed in the Sahel region (4500BC), Egypt (~4000BC), Ethiopia (! 3500BC), Mesopotamia (6000BC), and Northern- and Western Europe (~3000BC). The regions in Europe that are to the south of the 'wine cultivation limit' tended to produce other alcoholic drinks like wine and other grape-based drinks. Africa's beer cultures were the first to emerge, but remained largely confined to West-Africa and the Nile-states (i.e. Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia), but did travel southwards between 4500BC and 600AD through trade. In East Asia alcoholic drinks were based on other fruits and foodstuffs, including rice. For South Asia (i.e. India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) and the Americas I'm uncertain as to what manner of alcoholic drinks could be produced before the 1500s. During the European age of discovery 'beer' referred to a variety of mildly- to heavily-alcoholic drinks. Ales were most common, as they had a low percentage of alcohol (0.5-2%) and were suited to consumption as a replacement for the often dirty and unsafe well-water of those times. An added benefit of ales were their relative (to water and milk) longevity, allowing for their consumption on long sea voyages. Triple- and double-fermented beers (5-14% alcohol) were commonly brewed in abbeys and were consumed for their nutritious value, great taste, and intoxicating power. Religious orders in particularly Belgium and Germany were devoted to making these 'craft beers'. Finally, what you and I are most used to is Pilsner beer. The city of Pilsen (nowadays Plzen, Czech Republic) is the home of the recipe of contemporary prevalent 5%-ish lagers. First brewed in the mid-19th century, it became hugely popular in Central Europe, and during the Age of capital (1848-1875) managed to spread across Europe. Between 1875 and 1945 the recipe traveled the world, North to South, East to West, and more often than not through warfare. An interesting example of this is the Chinese beer you mentioned. The brand 'Tsingtao' from Qingdao, was founded in 1895 by German tradesmen in what would later (1901, after the Boxer War) become the German Concession in China. The company was quick to be relinquished by the Germans after World War 1, and became one of post-Qing China's first European-style breweries and distributors.