Beer has a place of honour in Ossetian tradition. The Nart sagas tell how a war chief saw a bird faint after eating hops, and his wise wife Shatana mixed the hops with ground malt and water to brew the first batch. Ossetian beer, bægæny, is dark brown to black, nearly without foam, milder than ordinary beer and was brewed at home, traditionally by the oldest woman of the family. It belongs to feasts, weddings and rites; at the summer festival of Uatsilla (Saint Elijah) a lamb and a bull were sacrificed and specially brewed beer was drunk. The festival Iron Bægæny, held each autumn in North and South Ossetia, still picks the best house brew.
In the Soviet years the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast (1922-1991) was part of the Georgian SSR. Its own brewery, the Stalinir (Tskhinvali) plant, gave its first beer on 9 August 1950; the plan was a million litres in the first year for the oblast and the nearby districts of Georgia. BeerAdvocate lists a Tshinvalskiy Pivovarenniy Zavod at Ul. Stalina 88 and OpenStreetMap marks its site, but we found no account of its fate. South Ossetia declared its independence from Georgia after the war of 1991-1992; a referendum on 19 January 1992 and an act of state independence on 29 May 1992 followed, and Russia recognised the republic on 26 August 2008.
The big brewery of the area stood in Akhalgori (Leningor), then under Tbilisi. Tsezar Chocheli started the Lomisa (Lomisi) brewery there in 1991 with a few brewing pots; it became a limited company in 1997. By 2008 Lomisi had two breweries, at Akhalgori and Natakhtari, about 0.55 million hl a year, six brands including Natakhtari and 42% of the Georgian market; Efes Breweries International signed to buy it on 8 February 2008 and closed on 21 February. In August 2008 the district passed to South Ossetia. The plant stopped, its equipment was stolen and the 275 workers of before the war were gone. A team of the prime minister Vadim Brovtsev restarted brewing for a time, then a prosecutor's case froze the plant. From 2017 the state enterprise Aluton leased it to Irdon LLC, which began with lemonade and mineral water.
The only brewery now is the Vysokogornaya Kelskaya Pivovarnya, opened at Leningor on 1 April 2022 on the Aluton site with over 100 million roubles from a Russian private investor and about 30 workers. Its Iryston, Border Star and Alanova beers went to the Prodexpo fair in February 2023; it won gold at the Sochi beer forum in 2023 and three golds in 2024, and in April 2024 sent 26,000 bottles of three beers to Crimea. In October 2025 the Tskhinvali Oktoberfest was renamed Highland Beer, and the new Highlandbeer lagers (Classic Light, Noble Light, Dark Amber, all 4.0% ABV) were shown at Prodexpo in February 2026 and at the Sochi forum on 19-22 May 2026, where an agreement with the Russian Union of Brewers was planned. In August 2026 the brewery won the contest for the best Ossetian beer at Iron Bægæny. Georgia does not accept the independence and counts Akhalgori as its own municipality.
USSR