A trail that leads nowhere but is not without interest. From The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1.1.270ish) by George Etherege.

DORIMANT …. [to the SHOEMAKER:] How now, you drunken sot?
SHOEMAKER: ’Zbud, you have no reason to talk; I have not had a bottle of sack of yours in my belly this fortnight.
MEDLEY: The orange-woman says your neighbours take notice what a heathen you are, and design to inform the bishop and have you burned for an atheist.
SHOEMAKER: Damn her, dunghill! If her husband does not remove her, she stinks so the parish intend to indict him for a nuisance.
MEDLEY: I advise you like a friend, reform your life; you have brought the envy of the world upon you by living above yourself. Whoring and swearing are vices too genteel for a shoemaker.
SHOEMAKER: ’Zbud, I think you men of quality will grow as unreasonable as the women; you would engross the sins o the nation; poor folks can no sooner be wicked, but they’re railed at by their betters.
DORIMANT: Sirrah, I’ll have you stand i’ the pillory for this libel.
SHOEMAKER: Some of you deserve it, I’m sure; there are so many of ’em, that our journeymen nowadays, instead of harmless ballads, sing nothing but your damned lampoons.
DORIMANT: Our lampoons, you rogue?
SHOEMAKER: Nay, good master, why should not you write your own commentaries as well as Cæsar?
MEDLEY: The rascal’s read, I perceive.
SHOEMAKER: You know the old proverb—ale and history.

John Barnard, the play’s most recent editor, gives the fullest gloss to the phrase:

ale and history: ‘Truth is in ale as in history’ (M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950), T578). But G. L. Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (1929), p. 4, regards the evidence as too slight for the sentence to be regarded as a proverb. However, the phrase was current in the seventeenth century, occurring in Bishop Corbett’s Iter Boreale (Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (1955), p. 43), while Fielding quotes an unidentified couplet in Tom Jones, I V.i.—‘While history with her comrade ale, /Soothes the sad series of her serious tale’—and also refers to Butler’s couplet, ‘Thou that with Ale, or viler Liquors, /Didst inspire Withers, Pryn and Vickars’ (Hudibras (1663–78), Part I, Canto i, 645–6).

Tilley’s entry reads

T578 TRUTH is in ale as in history
1618-21 R. CORBET in Shak. Cent. Praise, p. 128: Mine host was full of ale and history. 1654 GAYTON Pleas. Notes Don Quix. IV v, p. 195: That truth be in his Ale, as History. 1676 ETHEREGE Man Mode I i 283: You know the old Proverb, Ale and History.
Cf. A102: Fair cheve good ale, it makes many folks speak as they think.

The cross-referenced entry is

A102 Fair cheve good ALE, it makes many folks speak as they think.
1678 Ray, p.93: *Fiar chieve is used in the same sence here as … Good speed, Good success have it .. In vino veritas. 1710 PALMER, p. 18
[with cross-references to the above proverb and ‘In wine there is truth’]

Apperson – who was presumably Tilley’s main source – begins his entry, “I have not been able to identify the proverb to which the following quotations refer” and then cites the same passages as above.

The only more recent comment is in an Oxford Etymologist post by Anatoly Liberman (where I first learned the phrase a couple of years back). He also mentions it in less detail is his Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms.

At approximately the same time (before 1635), the phrase ale and history turned up. It became proverbial (though today hardly anyone has heard it). The implication seemed to be that drinking ale is inseparable from telling a good story. Perhaps so. The inventor of the phrase remains undiscovered. It is not even clear whether we are dealing with an idiom. In any case, the OED does not list it.

Here also are the other uses Apperson and Tilley identify. Richard Corbet‘s Iter Boreale (need to ctrl+f):

And now when wee had swett ’twixt sunn and sunn,
And eight miles long to thirty broad had spun;
Wee learne the just proportion from hence
Of the diameter and circumference.
That night yet made amends; our meat and sheetes
Were farr above the promise of those streetes;
Those howses, that were tilde with straw and mosse,
Profest but weake repaire for that dayes losse
Of patience: yet this outside lets us know,
The worthyest things make not the bravest show:
The shott was easy; and what concernes us more,
The way was so; mine host doth ride before.
Mine host was full of ale and history;
And on the morrow when hee brought us nigh
Where the two Roses joyn’d, you would suppose,
Chaucer nere made the Romant of the Rose.
Heare him. See yee yon wood? There Richard lay,
With his whole army: Looke the other way,
And loe where Richmond in a bed of gorsse
Encampt himselfe ore night, and all his force:
Upon this hill they mett. Why, he could tell
The inch where Richmond stood, where Richard fell:

And Edmund Gayton‘s Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot., a sort of uncorseted commentary on the novel.

Mine Host right use of these Romances got,
Reading such books merrily o’r the pot
Unto his guests; and every Gyant slaine,
And Lady rescued, (Tapster) brought up twaine,
Not Gyants, but fresh pots; then those dispatch
In healths unto the Ladies Princely match,
And to the Knight her valiant Paramour;
Why, here’s no danger now but of the score:
But mine Hosts credit upon that doth lie,
That truth be in his Ale, as History.
Fresh Tales, fresh Taps; and thus they frolique through
The Arts of Thracian Cirongilio,
And Tope away Hercanian Fleximart;
(A sober Knight, and us’d not to that Art)
So Don Diego Garcia of Par-edes,
Hath Pitcher-praise, and double health his meed-is.
So when our Don at his long home is anchor’d,
His memory in a Manchegan Tankard:
By the old Wives will be kept up, that’s all,
Counted the merriest, tosseth up the same.
(John Falstaffs Windsor Dames memoriall)
A Goddard or an Anniversary spice-Bowle,
(Drank off by th’ Gossips, e’r you can have thrice told)
And a God rest his soule. Our Don is laid,
Truce with the world; Mils be no more afraid,
And Sheep graze quietly, Coarses goe free,
The Don is laid, men may have leave to dye,
And to be buried; Carriers keep the rodes,
No more doe you your selves rifle your loades,
And lay it on Knight-Errants and their Squires.
Sancho’s a man of no such base desires,
An Earle in losses, and hath noble thoughts;
But when the Curate prov’d those books were nought
But lies and Fabulous delights, and Errantry
A Figment! Sancho put finger in th’ eye.

I can’t sell myself one way or another on the phrase as genuine proverb. All the passages do seem to assume its status – in that they refer to and leverage an expected familiarity with the idea rather explain it. But that glancing use makes it difficult to deduce a consistent meaning. Alongside Liberman’s conclusion – ‘the implication seemed to be that drinking ale is inseparable from telling a good story’ – you could just as easily posit a northernized in vino veritas or – and I take this as distinct from Liberman’s idea – that one picks up a lot of out of the way information in conversations that spring up as you kill time drinking. If I have to pick, I like the last. Just a few weeks back a rainy day bar visit gave me details about conservation problems at Madinat al-Zahra that I’d otherwise never have learned.