Beer is far older in Cyprus than the modern industry. At Kissonerga-Skalia near Paphos, archaeologists led by Lindy Crewe of the University of Manchester found a domed mud-plaster structure about two metres across from the Middle Bronze Age, some 3,500 years old, which they read as a kiln for drying malt. With grinding tools, a hearth and cooking pots beside it, the team calls it one of the earliest micro-breweries known (Levant, 2012). In the centuries after, the island was known for its wine, and beer in the modern sense came with the British, who took over the administration of Cyprus in 1878.

The first beer brewed on the island was Leon, in 1937. Christodoulos Platanis saw the habit of drinking beer, picked up from the British, spreading and began to brew it in a small building just outside the old city of Nicosia; for years it was the only local beer. In 1951 the Cyprus Wine Company followed. KEO, formed in 1927 as a wine maker in Limassol, had moved its plant in 1939 to its present site between the old and the new port, and on 17 May 1951 it began to brew KEO, a pilsner-type lager, with a first capacity of about 300,000 gallons a year. It is often said that the KEO recipe and technical advice came from Czechoslovakia, but no source confirms it; the company's own history does not mention it. KEO won a gold medal at the World Bottled Lager Competition at Burton upon Trent in 1987.

In 1963 the Photos Photiades Group, founded in 1942, took over the company that owned Leon, M.Chr. Platanis & Co, and formed Photos Photiades Breweries. It signed a licence with Carlsberg in the late 1960s (the group's own pages give 1966, 1967 and 1968), and the Cyprus Carlsberg brewery, opened in 1969 at Dali near Nicosia, was the first outside Denmark to brew Carlsberg. Leon then went into the background (sources date the end of its production to 1962 or 1968) until June 2003, when it was relaunched on the original 1937 all-malt recipe. In 2021 Leon became the first major Cypriot beer made with locally grown hops, Saaz grown at Kyperounda in the Troodos hills, and on 9 September 2026 it was certified vegan and gluten free.

Craft brewing began in the 2010s. Aphrodite's Rock at Tsada above Paphos, run by the English Ginn family in an old winery, got its permit to brew in January 2013 after almost three years of paperwork and is called the first licensed microbrewery in Cyprus. The Prime Microbrewery of Sotira in the Famagusta district, a new venture in a Cyprus Mail feature of September 2014, brews today as Octo (Octopus), with a beer made with archaeologists after an ancient Cypriot brewery and a Xynisteri grape ale that won gold in Germany. Pivo, founded in 2015 in the old town of Nicosia by three brothers and a cousin, moved to Alambra in 2020. Humor Beer (Hop Thirsty Friends, Dali, 2017), Radical Way (2019), Golem Brewhouse and CYCRAFT (2021) and Crossline Brewing (2023) followed. FOAM, the first festival of Cypriot microbreweries, was held in Nicosia on 29-30 September 2023 with eight producers.

Cypriot breweries delivered 42.9 million litres of beer in 2024, of which 2.5 million litres were exported. In 2026 the home market held while exports fell: in the first nine months 32.37 million litres were sold in Cyprus and 1.23 million litres exported, and in September exports dropped 84.4% to 28,577 litres. In July 2026 KEO said it was waiting for approvals for a 50 million euro distribution and spirits bottling centre in Limassol and would keep its brewery, which can make more than 30,000 hectolitres a month, on its old site.