The Egtved girl drank it.
But so did the king, the king’s soldiers, the rich people in stately homes, the monks in the monasteries, the poor in the countryside - yes, even the gods! In the old Nordic hero’s song, Eddaen, beer is mentioned many times and among others, the chief god, Odin drank very often:

Drunk I became.
I became dead drunk,
when I was with the wise Fjalar.
The best thing
about beer is,
the intoxication is not everlasting.

The fact that Odin had a brewery named after himself many years later is just one of the many demonstrations that beer has, in many ways, played a significant part in the Danes’ history.

The earliest official evidence of beer brewing in Denmark is from the Egtved girl's funeral 1357 B.C. - but currently, archaeologists are working on findings from the Aarhus region that should establish beer 1500 years earlier. Danes have always drunk beer or something like it for over 5,000 years.

The heyday of beer is from the late Middle Ages, around 1200 and up to the 1600’s. In this period, every Dane, child as well as old man, apparently drank six litres of beer per day. The food was very salty so therefore it had to be washed down well. The water was not fit for drinking, so it had to be boiled. And since you’re already doing that, you might as well make beer. It was done everywhere: in the King’s Brewery specially for the court and the Royal Danish Life Guards, at the monasteries (every nun at Maribo Monastery was given 14 barrels of beer per year), the tradesmen's wives in the towns, in the countryside where there were women who saw to the brewing in the brewery and the farmer's wife who made the best beer because it was easier to get labour.

It was drunk everywhere, and it was frowned upon if you drank too little.
It was top fermenting yeast beer, sweet – almost like light ale. In the 1300’s hops were used and that made brewing a little easier. Gradually, a form of professionalism occurred. Brewers’ guilds were formed and larger breweries appeared. More control began of the most difficult of all brewing disciplines: the fermentation process. But it was still a difficult art up through the 1700's and even later.

In the first half of the 1800’s, the first under-fermented beer appeared and Carlsberg was established later then Tuborg – and then beer brewing in Denmark began to be seriously industrialised and professionalized. In 1874, the first Danish bottled beer was launched and six years later, the first Danish pilsner appeared: Grøn Tuborg.

The next almost 100 years – until 1970 – only pilsner beer was brewed at the Danish breweries and the products became more and more uniform and tasted the same. In such a competition, the strongest wins and in 1970 Carlsberg and Tuborg merged and created a real Danish beer monopoly.

They still have the monopoly of the pilsner area. But the beer revolution, primarily after 2000 meant that the giant has now qualified competition from over 100 micro-breweries. The competition also means that the industrialised breweries brew special beer to an increasing extent.