Barbados, a sugar island that was an English and then British colony from 1625 until independence on 30 November 1966, had no brewery of its own until 1961. Banks Holdings still describes that year as the creation of Barbados' first local brewery.

The idea came from the Guyanese businessman Peter D'Aguiar, who had promoted Banks Breweries in British Guiana in 1955. In the late 1950s the Barbados government offered tax concessions for a local brewery; Banks DIH of Guyana supplied about 30 per cent of the money and the rest came from shares sold on the island, to more than 3,000 Barbadians. The brewery at Wildey, near Bridgetown, opened on 7 September 1961 with Banks Beer, a pilsner-style lager, and by 1963 it also made a milk stout and Tiger Malt. The concessions were soon withdrawn and Banks DIH sold its stake to Barbados Shipping & Trading, keeping the right to the Banks name outside a few islands. Exports began in 1968 with Saint Vincent and Dominica, and in 1973 the Barbadian company won the name for the whole English-speaking Caribbean. The two Banks firms made separate beers until 2005, when they agreed to market jointly; the first shipment to the United States left in 2008.

In 1991 the brewery bought the Barbados Bottling Company and became Banks Holdings Limited, and in 1997 it added Pine Hill Dairy. Its distribution arm sells Guinness, and Stallion Milk Stout, a sweet stout, reached the shops in November 2010. In 2011, by the group's own account, a new brewery opened at Newton, Christ Church; the old one at Wildey closed, and the works sports club left its ground beside it in 2013.

Control has changed hands since. In October 2015 the Brazilian Ambev, through SLU Beverages, bid 4 Barbados dollars a share for Banks Holdings and the Trinidadian ANSA McAL countered with 5.20; Ambev won, though the group dates AB InBev's arrival to 2016. The Barbados Bottling Company went to KOSCAB, the Coca-Cola bottler of the southern Caribbean, in 2018. On 31 July 2025 KOSCAB took a majority of SLU Beverages from AB InBev for at least 186 million US dollars, payable by 2028, and says it will run Banks Holdings and St Vincent Brewery as separate companies. A fire in a laboratory at Newton halted production on 23 October 2024 until it was investigated.

Craft beer is small. 10 Saints, named for the ten saints' parishes among the island's eleven, was conceived by Glyn Partridge in Speightstown in 2009 and went on sale in May 2012: a lager aged about 90 days in Mount Gay Special Reserve rum casks, bronze medallist at the 2012 Caribbean Rum & Beer Festival, later sold in a dozen export markets. DreadHop Brewing of Oistins began in 2013, when Charles Mackenzie turned a shipping container into a 200-litre brewery called The Brewhouse; it became DreadHop at the end of 2019 with a 2,000-litre brewhouse and a tap room, and calls itself the island's only locally owned and operated craft brewery.