Beer is old in the lands of Belarus. The documents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania mention brewery houses, called brovars in Belarusian, from the 16th century. Lida was given the right to build a brewery in 1590, but nothing shows that anyone used it: in 1680 its 19 taverns, selling beer, vodka and mead, served beer brought in from elsewhere, sometimes German, and the first breweries of the town opened only in the 1860s.

Industrial brewing began in the 1860s and 1870s. In Minsk the townswoman Rokhlya Frumkina was allowed on 29 January 1864 to build a wooden brewery, today's Alivaria, the oldest brewery still working in the country. Count Karol Hutten-Czapski, mayor of Minsk, bought it in 1893 and built a stone brewery, Bohemia, in 1894; in 1898 it passed to the Lekert brothers, Bavarian subjects who also owned breweries at Mogilev and Gomel, and by 1913 it was the biggest of the Minsk province. In Lida Nosel Pupko was allowed to build in 1873 and brewed his first beer in 1876; in 1910 the town's two breweries made 4.88 million litres, more than anywhere else in today's Belarus. Vitebsk (1875), Grodno (1877) and Mozyr (1884-85) followed.

From 1921 to 1939 the west, with Lida and Grodno, was Poland and the east was Soviet; in the 1920s the output of Lida fell to a fifth or a seventh of what it had been. Brewing went on through the Second World War. In Soviet times Lida brewed Zhigulevskoe from 1940 and its own Lidskoe from 1967, and the state built new plants: Dednovo at Bobruisk in 1958, a brewing and winemaking combine at Brest (the first beer in March 1971), Minsk Brewery No. 2 and Rechitsa in 1975 (the first canned beer of Belarus) and a larger Bobruisk plant in 1976. When the all-Union campaign against alcohol began in 1985, Lida turned to soft drinks and the Brest plant became a soft-drinks combine in 1986; the same year the Minsk association was renamed Krinitsa.

After 1991 the breweries became joint-stock companies: Lida in 1991, Alivaria in 1994, Rechitsa in 1996, the state's Krinitsa in 2001. Lida brewed the first licensed beer of Belarus in 1996, the Austrian Hopfenkönig. Krinitsa, modernised under a state programme of 2003, made 39.8 per cent of the country's beer in 2006-07. Foreign investors came in 2004-2008: a venture of Detroit Investments, Syabar from 2005, took over the old Dednovo brewery of Bobruisk and was sold to Heineken in December 2007, which took 51 per cent of Rechitsapivo in May 2008; Carlsberg became the strategic investor of Alivaria in 2008, after the EBRD (2005) and Baltic Beverages Holding (2006), and held 67.8 per cent from 2011; Olvi of Finland bought 51 per cent of Lidskoe Pivo in 2008 and 94.56 per cent by 2014. Mozyr stopped brewing in 2004, Grodno in 2007 and Slutsk in the middle of the 2000s. Heineken moved the brewing of Rechitsa to Bobruisk in August 2013 and sold its Belarusian breweries to Oasis, which has run them since 2017 as Bobruisk Brovar, brewing Heineken, Gösser and Zlatý Bažant under licence. Brestskoe Pivo, insolvent from 2014, was bought in 2020 by Gagik Tsarukyan; in 2025 its assets went to a new company.

Craft brewing is young. The first IPA of the country was brewed in December 2014; the restaurant breweries Staromestny Pivovar (2007), Arbat (2013) and Druzya (2014) put the first American Pale Ale on sale in 2015, and the first craft beer festival was held in Minsk that August. The first modern microbrewery, Pilzensky Pivovar at Terebun in the Brest region, opened in 2012 (13 Litar from 2015). Nine craft breweries opened in 2016 and there were 47 in 2021, 64 per cent of them in Minsk, among them Malanka, started in 2019 by three home-brewers, and Punchiller, the best rated on Untappd in 2021. Belarus brewed 381.5 million litres in 2025, 60th in the BarthHaas ranking and 0.9 per cent less than in 2024. Olvi, the owner of Lidskoe Pivo, no longer invests there; in 2024 the brewery sold 351.3 million litres of beer and other drinks.