Benin's oldest beer is made from sorghum and millet. In the north-west, in the Atacora hills, it is called tchoukoutou: women brew it every day in small family breweries and serve it from cabarets in calabashes. It was once kept for funerals and weddings, and the Ottamari of Natitingou say they were the first to brew it. Around Parakou a millet beer called choukachou is made in quantity and sent south by rail and road. In the south the old drinks were palm wine and sodabi, the palm spirit that, by one account, two men from Allada brought home from the First World War; the colonial administration banned its production in 1931, partly to protect imported European spirits, and a 2025 study follows its repression down to 1975.

Industrial beer came late. By the company's own history Dahomey had no brewery of its own before independence: until 1957 the business was a branch of the Brasserie de la Côte d'Ivoire (BRACODI), which shipped drinks from Abidjan for resale, and it then became the Société de Brasserie de Dahomey (SOBRADA), renamed SOBRADO at independence on 1 August 1960. A 1972 trade survey dates the Brasseries du Dahomey to 1957. The plant is in Akpakpa, on the road to Porto-Novo in Cotonou. In 1970-71 it had a capacity of 100,000 hectolitres, brewed Sobrado and Flag Spéciale and made 104,000 hectolitres of beer; the French SOFRINA group held about 94 percent through SOGEPAL.

After the 1972 coup of Mathieu Kérékou the brewery was nationalised in 1975, the year of the People's Republic of Benin, and renamed La Béninoise, with more than 1,200 staff. Its beer of that name held a near-monopoly, and its caps carried the red star of the revolutionary flag, as they still did in 2004. When the debts of the 1980s forced the state to sell, Castel, which had bought Brasseries et Glacières Internationales in January 1990, took over La Béninoise on 6 January 1992 as the Société Béninoise de Brasserie (SOBEBRA), 90 percent Castel-BGI and the rest the state and local investors. The trading company SONEBO and the Possotomè water company Posso, both founded in 1994, were later merged into one SOBEBRA SA.

SOBEBRA is the only industrial brewer. In April 2013 it reported turnover of about 96 billion CFA francs and 8 to 9 billion invested a year; beer consumption was 10 litres a head, against 50 in Cameroon and over 80 in Gabon. A fire after power cuts damaged the Akpakpa plant on 23 February 2014. The company works from Cotonou, Parakou and Possotomè, delivered over 400 million bottles in 2022 and was adding a line to lift bottling from 90,000 to 140,000 bottles an hour. Its beers are La Béninoise, Pils, Flag Spéciale, Castel Beer, Beaufort Lager and Hagbè, with Guinness, Eku Bavaria and Doppel Munich under licence. On 1 July 2022 Coca-Cola Donga Bottling Company became Coca-Cola's bottler in Benin, after Coca-Cola and Castel parted; SOBEBRA makes its own World-Cola. In May 2023 the company became the Société Béninoise de Boissons Rafraîchissantes, and in 2025 it counts 605 direct jobs.

No craft brewery is reported; the small scale is the tchoukoutou cabaret. The one rival project is the Dongaco group's Coca-Cola Donga Bottling Company in the Sèmè-Podji zone: on 19 September 2022 the West African Development Bank (BOAD) signed a 20 billion franc loan for a brewery complex and can line of 920,000 hectolitres a year, and in July 2024 a Beninese paper spoke of a 2-million-hectolitre beer plant. On 18 December 2025 BOAD approved a restructuring of the loan, and Koriactu reported that the can line had not started and the Coca-Cola licence was reportedly withdrawn. No beer from this project has been found.