Beer in what is now Burkina Faso is older than any brewery. Dolo, a sorghum beer malted and brewed at home and sold in cabarets by women brewers called dolotières, is still widely drunk: a 2021 review says about 75% of the country's sorghum goes into it, that nearly 60% of the population drinks it, and that in Ouagadougou alone some 600 dolotières make 36 million litres a year. The French took Ouagadougou in 1896 and made Upper Volta a colony in 1919; it was split among its neighbours from 1932 to 1947 and became independent on 5 August 1960. Bottled lager came from the Ivory Coast. In 1955 the Brasseries de Côte d'Ivoire (Bracodi) opened a beer depot in Bobo-Dioulasso and bought a small soft-drink bottling unit there, and filling lines followed at Bobo-Dioulasso in 1957 and at Ouagadougou in 1959, supplied with beer in refrigerated containers.

The first brewery was Bravolta, the Brasserie de la Haute-Volta. The company was registered at Bobo-Dioulasso in 1962 by Sogepal, a Paris holding tied to the group Brasseries et Glacières Internationales (BGI); in 1964 the bottling shop became a brewery and the first Voltaic beer, Bravolta, was launched, later joined by the premium Flag. Output rose from 35,000 hl in 1964 to 180,000 hl in 1976, and some beer went to Mali. The company's own history places the brewery in the 1960s and counts its 60 years from 1960. A second BGI brewery, the Société voltaïque de brasseries (Sovobra), was founded in 1974 by the former minister Édouard Yaméogo and was brewing at Ouagadougou by 1977, taking part of Bravolta's market. After the revolution of August 1983, Bravolta became Brakina and Sovobra became Sobbra in 1984, the year the country was renamed Burkina Faso.

Pierre Castel bought BGI in 1989-90 (the company says 1989, the French business archive January 1990), and in 1992 the two Burkinabè breweries were merged, Brakina absorbing Sobbra; its distribution company Sodibo followed in 1994. Brakina brews at Kossodo, in the industrial zone of Ouagadougou, and at Bobo-Dioulasso. Its flagship lager is made with local maize, 10,200 tonnes of it in 2020, and the range now includes Sobbra, Castel Beer, Doppel Munich, Beaufort Lager and Guinness. In March 2015 workers occupied both plants, and the strike ended on 31 March with a 15% pay rise agreed in the presence of Pierre Castel. The company became Boissons Rafraîchissantes du Burkina Faso in 2021, the year of a CFA 30 billion investment plan, when the Ouagadougou plant had more than 1,660 employees.

Brakina now has rivals. Brafaso, a Burkinabè-owned brewery near Ouagadougou launched in 2002 or 2004 depending on the source, stopped in 2008 and was put into liquidation in 2011; the state took over the plant but began to rehabilitate it only in March 2024. Libs Brasserie, owned by the Indian businessman Manoj Lakhi Vaswani, brewed its first beer, Marina, at Gampéla in February 2019 and has a capacity of 430,000 hl. The state brewery came back as SN-Brafaso, a company with CFA 6 billion of capital, 70% held by the state: President Ibrahim Traoré reopened the plant at Komsilga on 25 November 2025, after a CFA 17.9 billion rehabilitation, with 600,000 hl of capacity and the Braf'or and Brafaso beers. The country brewed 3.1 million hl in 2024, second in the West African Economic and Monetary Union after the Ivory Coast with 4.8 million hl.

Brakina launched Brakina Spéciale in 2025, an amber beer of 5%. In June 2026 beer ran short in Ouagadougou and bar prices rose by about CFA 100 francs a bottle; on 23 June Brakina blamed rising demand and promised more capacity in the years to come. On 6 July 2026 the government signed a CFA 30 billion financing agreement for a second SN-Brafaso brewery at Léguéma near Bobo-Dioulasso, approved in January 2026.