Armenia is better known for wine and brandy, but beer is old there too. Xenophon, marching through the Armenian highlands around 400 BCE, wrote that barley wine stood in clay jars and was drunk through reeds, very strong but a pleasant drink for the local people, and in 1936 the archaeologist Boris Piotrovsky found jars with charred barley seeds at the Urartian fortress of Teishebaini. The Armenian word garejur means barley water. It is often said that Armenia may be the birthplace of beer, but no source confirms it. The first factories came in the 1890s, under the Russian Empire. In 1892 Harutyun Avedyants founded the Zanga brewery in the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan; it brewed one beer, a German-style bock, and won awards in Naples and Milan. A brewery was built in Alexandropol (now Gyumri) in 1898, and its historic building on Jivani Street still stands. Zanga passed to the state, Avedyants was hired there as an employee on 1 March 1924 and died in 1926, and the plant closed in the 1920s.

Brewing came back with the Soviet plants. The Yerevan brewery was built in 1952 for 500,000 decalitres a year, the Leninakan (Gyumri) brewery opened in 1970, and the Kotayk brewery in Abovyan, built in 1974-77 by a Czechoslovak firm, began full production in January 1978. In Gyumri the old mansion of the 1860s became a state beerhouse, Poloz Mukuch, at the start of the 1960s, and it is still open. The earthquake of 1988 nearly razed the Gyumri brewery.

The three plants were privatised in the 1990s. Kotayk passed in 1995 to Gagik Tsarukyan; in 1996-97 the French group Castel took 71% of it for 17 million US dollars, in March 2006 Tsarukyan's remaining 29% went to the French side for 4 million, and in 2011 his Multi Group bought the brewery back. On 11 February 2022 it was sold to the businessmen Arash Nosratialamdari and Garik Mkrtchyan, 50% each. It brews Kotayk, Erebuni and Urartu. In Yerevan the brewery became a joint-stock company in 1997 and created the Kilikia brand; the first bottle for export went to the United States on 15 October 1998. Yerevan Beer CJSC now brews 12 beers, ships to more than 18 countries, and in August 2024 showed its Czech-made brewhouse to the Czech ambassador. Gyumri-Garejour LLC rebuilt its plant after privatisation from 1995 and brews Gyumri, Ararat and Aleksandrapol, with malt of its own.

Output rose from just over 7 million litres in 2002 and 10.7 million in 2005 to a record 30.5 million litres in 2022, and Armenia imports more beer than it exports. New regional breweries followed: Kellers in Sevan (2007), Hayasy in Voskevaz (2011) and Dilijan, built from 2013 for 2.5 billion drams, which began to brew in late August 2017 and was opened on 21 November 2017 with a capacity of 10 million litres. Craft beer began with the brewpub Beer Academy in 2012 and took off in spring 2016 with Dargett in Yerevan, run by the brothers Aren and Hovhannes Durgarian: the first IPA, the first cider and the first fruit beer (an apricot ale) made in Armenia. Dargett began to bottle in 2018 and sells to Russia, France and the United States; Wikipedia dates its own brewery near Abovyan to 2019 and counted seven brewing companies and nine microbreweries or brewpubs in 2023. At the Beer Days festival in Yerevan, held since 2021, 25 brewers took part in August 2025, eleven more than in 2024.