Botswana brewed long before it had a brewery. Sorghum beer has been part of social life and diet there for many centuries, and home brewing for sale was a cottage industry, the shebeen queen trade, which factory brews later undercut (a 1984 Michigan State dissertation). The traditional opaque beer, bojalwa jwa Setswana, takes four to five days to make; the illicit khadi and setopoti take about a day. Khama III, who ruled the Bangwato from 1875, prohibited the liquor trade and was praised for it by the London Missionary Society. Bechuanaland was a British protectorate from 1885 until independence as Botswana on 30 September 1966.
Factory beer arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. A corporate timeline says Botswana Breweries Limited was set up in Francistown in the 1960s to brew Chibuku, the commercial sorghum and maize beer sold in cartons that must be shaken; it later had plants at Lobatse, Gaborone and Palapye. The lager brewery at Gaborone began as Prinz Brau Botswana, with two brands, Prinz Brau and Prinz Deluxe, and is dated to 1970. In 1977 South African Breweries took management control of Kgalagadi Breweries (KBL) with 40% of the equity, and KBL began bottling Coca-Cola. Its holding company, Sechaba Brewery Holdings, listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange in 1989. Before 2008 lager sales were 580,000 hectolitres, 560,000 of them KBL's, and sorghum beer 2.6 million: some 190 litres a head in all.
The alcohol levy changed this. President Ian Khama proposed a 70% levy in 2008 to curb drinking, crime and HIV; it took effect on 1 November 2008 at 30%, after KBL and Botswana Breweries dropped their court case, and rose to 40% in 2010, 50% in December 2013 and 55% in 2015. By November 2009 lager volumes had fallen 35% and traditional beer 14%. The traditional beer regulations of July 2012 banned residential sales of Chibuku: in the year to March 2013 Botswana Breweries lost 24% of its volume, the Palapye plant closed and drinkers went back to home brews. Botswana Breweries was merged into KBL in 2013. Beer imports, led by Namibia's Windhoek, grew from 3.6 million pula in 2007 to 124 million in 2011; KBL launched the premium St Louis Export in 2009.
In December 2018 the government cut the levy to 35% of the cost of production. Then came the pandemic: KBL could not trade for 96 days in 2020 and 126 in 2021, in bans from 4 January to 28 February and from 28 June to 6 September 2021. After the June ban it stopped Chibuku production at Francistown and Gaborone, went to court, but the High Court refused to hear the case as urgent. Craft beer came in the same years. Big Sip Co, the first microbrewery, started in 2017 at Gaborone but closed in 2021 and was in liquidation by August 2022. Okavango Craft Brewery at Maun, founded in 2019 and launched in February 2020, malts millet from farmers of the Okavango Panhandle; it won the African Celebration Award at the 2022 African Beer Cup and again in May 2025.
The rules are loosening. Under 2025 amendments to the liquor regulations, bars and bottle stores could open from 10:00 to 06:00 between 24 December 2025 and 4 January 2026. On 11 June 2026 President Duma Boko told KBL's management that the government did not intend to raise the levy, now 35%, and that any change would more likely be a cut. KBL was expecting a 25% fall in first-quarter profit, but AB InBev's Richard Rivett-Carnac said its investment would rise from 128 million pula the year before to 200 million, aimed at production for export, and that KBL had begun piloting beer exports to Zambia.
