Beer in Eritrea is older than its factories. Siwa (säwa), the beer of Eritrea and Tigray, is brewed at home from a toasted flatbread of barley, or of sorghum, millet or maize in the lowlands, with a little yeast and leaves of the gesho shrub, and drunk at social gatherings and after work; it is served in beer houses called enda siwa. Alongside it came mies, a honey wine, and araki, a home-distilled spirit often flavoured with anise.
Industrial brewing came with the Italians, who bought Assab on the Red Sea in 1869, took Massawa in 1885 and made Eritrea a colony on 1 January 1890; by the eve of the Second World War almost 100,000 of them lived there. In 1938-39 the road-construction engineer Luigi Melotti set up a factory in Asmara on a former depot of road materials. It began with liquors on rudimentary equipment and, according to the Brewery History Society, brewed its first bottled beer only in 1942; a glass works followed in 1959-60. Football clubs under the Melotti name date from 1936 or 1944, and the works team still plays as Asmara Brewery FC. German Wikipedia says Melotti died in 1946 and that his widow and son kept the firm going under the British military administration (1941-52).
After the federation with Ethiopia in 1952 and the annexation of 1962, Melotti was one of the three first-generation breweries of the Ethiopian empire and supplied the provinces of Eritrea and Tigray; with St. George it did the pilot survey for the Meta-Abo brewery, in which it was a founding shareholder in 1965. The Derg, in power since September 1974, took St. George at once and Melotti and Meta-Abo in February 1975, in the middle of the war of independence (1961-1991).
After independence (24 May 1993) the plant was renamed Asmara Brewery and became the national brewery; Ethiopia built new breweries to make up for the loss, and Ethiopian drinkers kept away from Melotti for political reasons. In 1998 it exported up to 40% of its output; production fell in 2000, for a time. The state holds the majority with private investors: shares were offered to returning diaspora in 2012, and in 2013 a South African concern was negotiating to take the brewery over (US State Department, June 2014). A canning line for export, 1,800 cans an hour, started in January 2015; in August 2017 Deutsche Welle reported that privatisation had been delayed again and that the brewery struggled with water and foreign-currency shortages. It makes Asmara Lager (5%), Asmara Extra Stout and spirits led by the anise liqueur Areki.
A second brewery, the private Golden Star in Asmara, opened in 2004: a visitor in May 2005 found it a year old, "shining and new", under manager Stifanos Habtemariam, its beer twice the price of Asmara. BeerAdvocate calls the 4.5% Golden Star a German-style pilsner and lists it as inactive after one rating in May 2016, while Wikipedia and a 2014 list claim it is the only beer left after Asmara Brewery closed, which the 2026 ratings of Asmara Lager contradict. There are no craft breweries, and no news of either brewery from 2025-26 turned up; Asmara Lager is still reviewed abroad, for instance by a Swedish beer club in October 2024.
