Beer is older here than the breweries. Dolotières, the women who serve the fermented drink dolo and other honey- or grain-based brews, are an older tradition than any factory. The French took the coast as a protectorate in 1889 and made Côte d'Ivoire a colony on 10 March 1893, part of French West Africa. Industrial brewing came only after the Second World War.

The first industrial brewery in the archives is the Société des Brasseries de la Côte d'Ivoire (Bracodi), incorporated on 13 June 1949 with 140 million CFA francs by the Brasseries du Maroc group, the Indochina brewers Brasseries et Glacières de l'Indochine (later BGI) and the Sofrina group. Its plant on the Grand-Bassam road in Abidjan, making beer, soft drinks and ice, was due to start at the end of 1951 and was working in 1952. By 1970 it could brew 300,000 hl a year (450,000 hl by 1974) and made Bracodi, Boxer stout, Best Export Quality and Flag Spéciale. A Bouaké depot opened in 1959 became the Société des Brasseries de Bouaké in 1971 (Bracodi 50%), with a small brewery added in 1973, and a Bracodi unit at Daloa brewed Guinness from 1981.

A second company grew out of soft drinks. The Dayan family founded Soliglace, a lemonade and ice maker, in Abidjan in 1955; in 1958 it joined Stella Artois of Belgium and became the Société de limonaderies et brasseries d'Afrique (Solibra), with a brewery at Treichville that was inaugurated in 1960 and a second one at Bouaflé from 1978. Castel bought Bracodi's parent BGI in January 1990; on 1 April 1994 Bracodi bought Solibra, which was listed on the regional stock exchange (BRVM) on 16 September 1998, and in 2002 the two merged under the name Solibra. By 2008 its Abidjan brewery could make 5,000 hl a day.

Under Castel the market was close to a monopoly until 2013. Les Brasseries Ivoiriennes (LBI), a subsidiary of the Eurofind group, built a 9-hectare plant with German equipment in the Yopougon industrial zone of Abidjan and launched the cheap lager Number One in May 2013; by early 2015 it held about 28% of the popular market against 36% for Solibra's Bock. After a failed premium launch (Gold 5.5), new beer taxes in February 2014 and the death of its founder Moustapha Khalil in March 2014, it was sold to Castel's Solibra in early 2015 (for CFA 32 to 50 billion, by different reports), and the companies merged in May 2017. In April 2017 Heineken and the distributor CFAO (51% and 49%) opened their Brassivoire brewery at Anyama, 24 km north of Abidjan: about CFA 100 billion, 1.6 million hl a year, the Ivoire lager on sale since November 2016, and a CFA 20 billion extension announced that November. Castel answered with price cuts on Bock and about CFA 37 billion for its plants, doubling Yopougon from 250,000 to 500,000 hl.

Two groups brew all the beer today, and no craft brewery turned up in the sources. Solibra (Castel) works plants at Treichville, Yopougon and Bouaflé and brews Bock, Beaufort, Castel Beer, Flag Spéciale and Guinness; on 30 August 2024 it launched Corona Extra of AB InBev at CFA 800 a bottle. Brassivoire brews Ivoire, Heineken and Desperados and the non-alcoholic Rhino. Beer consumption reached 29 litres per head in 2024, up from 27.4 litres in 2022. Solibra's net profit fell from CFA 27.6 billion in 2016 to 1.3 billion in 2018, recovered to 17.5 billion in 2020 and, by a 2026 headline, doubled to CFA 46 billion in 2025; in April 2026 it opened a new wastewater treatment plant at Bouaflé, whose brewery had stopped in September 2018 when the Bandama river flooded.