Bhutan's own beer is chang, an unhopped, often milky home brew made by the women of the house from whatever grain grows nearby: barley, wheat, millet, rice, sometimes starchy tubers. It is fermented not with malt and brewer's yeast but with cakes called phab, made of cooked grain and powders of wild mountain plants that carry the wild yeasts. Sin chang and bang chang, the farmhouse brews, are kept for occasions such as the tshechu festival and cannot be sold. Next to chang stands ara, a spirit fermented or distilled from rice, maize, millet, wheat or barley, which in Bhutan may be made and drunk only at home; the government's stated aim is to reduce its production gradually. A craft brewer of today was told that hops were grown here successfully in the late 1970s or early 1980s and dropped only because the farmers lost interest.
Bhutan became a hereditary monarchy in December 1907, and the first commercial brewery that can be documented is recent. Bhutan Brewery Pvt. Ltd. was commissioned on 17 December 2006 in the Pasakha industrial estate near Phuentsholing, on the Indian border. Its Druk 11000, a strong lager of about 8%, is the best known beer of Bhutan, sold in every shop and restaurant; the company also makes the lighter Druk Lager (5%), Druk Supreme and a wit beer. VinePair in 2018 called it the largest beer producer of the country, and a visitor in 2025 the big and only player in industrial beer.
The craft scene is older than it looks. Red Panda, an unfiltered Swiss-style wheat beer, comes from the one-room Bumthang Brewery, tied to the Swiss Fritz Maurer, who came to Bhutan in the 1960s to help with Brown Swiss cattle and cheese and later became an honorary Bhutanese citizen; one 2025 account dates the brewery to 2006. Ser Bhum Brewery, a family business near Hongtsho by Thimphu, spent seven years on clearances and licences, was approved in 2013, and launched its Bhutan Glory Amber Ale and Dragon Stout in 2016. Namgay Artisanal Brewery at Paro was built by Dorji Gyeltshen, a hotelier who studied in Switzerland, brewed at home from 2009 and had a business plan by 2015; in April 2018 it was sending kegs to bars in Paro and Thimphu, and the same year its red rice lager, wheat beer and dark ale went into bottles for shops across the country. The red rice comes from partner farms near the brewery, and its 13 fermenters can make 2,000 litres a day. Mircula Meadery and Brewery in Bumthang, planned in 2015 and working from 2019, makes honey braggots and meads.
Tuesday is a dry day, when alcohol may not be sold. In 2025 Bhutan adopted a new Excise Tax Bill: from 1 January 2026 alcohol was to carry Nu 1,200 per litre of pure alcohol in place of the 200 percent sales tax, which would lift a 500 ml can of Druk 11000 from Nu 65 to Nu 90. In the last months of 2025 Druk 11000 and Druk Lager ran short in the shops of Gelephu, although the brewery's supply was uninterrupted: dealers were hoarding ahead of the tax, a shopkeeper said he could buy only 10 cases of beer a person, the price of a case of lager rose from Nu 1,500 to Nu 1,550, and the competition authority received three complaints.
