Marvel's when Wolverine reaches the end of time, and his immortal cells burn away, he'll long for a good Canadian ale. But in the miniseries Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine, a time-traveling Wolverine goes so far as to sacrifice the history of the world... to invent beer in the first place.
Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine was a 6-issue miniseries released by Marvel Comics in 2012. Written by Jason Aaron (Wolverine and the X-Men, Thor) and drawn by Joe Kubert (Captain America, Conan), with colors from Justin Ponsor, the millennia-spanning adventure pairs up two iconic Marvel heroes with decades of friction and rivalry. Peter Parker's snark and Logan's grizzled rage make them as likely to rip each other apart as team up. At the beginning of the story, when a mishap strands them millions of years in the past, that becomes a serious hazard.
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The two heroes bump into each other while foiling a robbery, just as a crook spills mysterious diamonds onto the floor that send the two heroes back in time. And when the story reveals how each hero has fared in the distant past, their differences in personality couldn't be any clearer.
Peter has been exiled by Logan under pain of (gruesomely described) death, and spends his days studying the landscape and calculating the time remaining until a falling meteor causes an extinction event. He whiles away his nights carving statues of a mysterious woman who haunts his dreams; in his seclusion, he's fallen in love with the idea of her. Meanwhile, the fuzzy mutant has become the warrior-god of a race of pre-human hominids, leading the "Small Folk" in defensive battles against larger invading primates. He is their king and their salvation, termed "Six-Claws" after the weapons he uses to rend their foes. If there's a love that haunts his dreams, it's a hoppy pale ale, and he gradually teaches the Small Folk to produce it.
Spider-Man is appalled. He insists that Wolverine altering the species' history by showing them technology and teaching them to fight will have massive effects on the timeline. When the pair escape extinction into the far future, the web-slinger's warnings prove to be true. An apocalypse has wiped out humanity, but the Small Folk survived thanks to Wolverine's teachings, making them the vicious rulers of the wasteland. The evolutionary tangent sees Wolverine as their messiah, and brings him an offering: the "sacred liquid" which he, in his godlike wisdom, created for them at the beginning of time. Logan chugs it down and identifies it as a "damn good IPA".
The ripples caused by the Avengers' time-travel exploits are mostly undone by the end, but their earliest efforts remain. Spider-Man's carvings are exhibited as wonders of the Mesozoic era. A weary Wolverine orders a drink at a New York bar and receives a "Small Folk Ale." Wolverine has saved the world countless times, but the Marvel Universe owes him an even greater debt, thanks to his founding of the first brewery on the planet Earth. Just don't tell Spider-Man.
