Wine, not beer, is the old drink of Abkhazia, together with the grape spirit chacha. The traditional soft drinks are made of milk and honey, and there is ajyrdzy, grape juice and sugar fermented for a month in a clay jar buried in the ground. No brewing tradition older than the Soviet years and no earlier brewery turned up in the sources. In the early 1950s the Sukhumi works was named among the new breweries of the USSR, and the brewery itself gives 1953 as the year it opened, in the Abkhaz ASSR of the Georgian SSR. Its beer found buyers at once, and while imports were limited it was sold all over the republic; at times the plant could not meet the demand.

Labels of the Soviet and post-Soviet years show the plant as the Sukhumi head plant of beer and fruit waters and later as a joint enterprise, with Zhigulevskoe, Moskovskoe and Rizhskoe beside Ivanych and Sukhumskoe. On 23 July 1992 the Abkhaz faction of the Supreme Soviet declared independence from Georgia; Georgia does not accept it, and Russia recognised the republic on 26 August 2008. In 2007 the plant was reorganised as OOO Pivovarenny Zavod Sukhumsky. It stands on Adleiba Street in the centre of Sukhum on 1.39 hectares, and in 2018 its capacity was given as up to 700,000 decalitres of beer and 400,000 of soft drinks a year. Ivanych is named after its late director Omar Ivanovich Kvarchia. Money went into equipment from 2010; in 2017 the plant got four years of relief on half of its profit tax and property tax, and its director Amra Anua spoke of 50-tonne cylindro-conical tanks that cut the maturing of a batch from 30-35 days to 16-17, and of a new brewhouse planned from a Hungarian firm. It brews light Sukhumskoe in classic and original versions, the dark Barkhatnoe and the wheat Ivanych to a Czech recipe with Zatec hops, and in February 2019 it won the Grand Prix of Prodexpo in Moscow for its light Sukhumskoe among other products.

A second maker, Napitki Abkhazii i Ko (Abkhazian Drinks Co.), laid its first vineyard in 2007 at Alakhadzy in the Gagra district and opened a wine and drinks plant there in 2010 on private money. Its brewery has Kaspar Schulz equipment, a stated capacity of 500,000 decalitres a year, and makes Assir, light and dark; Assir was shown at the Golden Autumn fair in Moscow in October 2012, where a blogger found the bottle light-struck. In Gagra the restaurant brewery Old Prague, at the entrance to the park of Prince Oldenburg, brews Oldenburg: its equipment came from the Czech Republic, a Czech brewer taught the local one, and it makes light, amber and dark lagers. A visitor of September 2015 called it the first restaurant brewery in Abkhazia, while a local site dates the brewing to 2010 and gives the capacity as 12 tonnes a month. The same visitor counted three breweries for about 250,000 people. Travellers also mention a private brewer at Ochamchira.

Beer is a summer trade. In 2017 the Sukhum director said that the main buyer is the tourist, and in winter the plant makes mostly soft drinks. The latest news: on 6 April 2026, at an economic forum in Sukhum, the prime minister of Bashkortostan Andrey Nazarov said that brewing of the Bashkir beer Shikhan in Abkhazia was being worked out, and on 10 July 2026 Apsnypress reported that a new plant for beer and soft drinks, Kristall, would be started at Lykhny in the Gudauta district with a preferential loan from VTB.