Georgia is a wine country, but its mountain regions, Khevsureti, Pshavi, Tusheti and Mtiuleti among them, have long brewed aludi, a beer of barley malt and hops made for village festivals: the pots are set about a week before the holiday and an elder says a prayer when the beer is served. Investor.ge wrote in August 2026 that the government is working to add aludi to UNESCO's heritage list.

Town brewing came with the Germans of Tbilisi. A heritage text on the German quarter says the Mader family brewed beer from 1850 and sold it across the Caucasus, that Louisa Mader owned the brewery in the 1900s, and that the hotel owner Friedrich Wetzel opened the first beer factory in Georgia. Georgia Today places Wetzel's brewery, run with his brother, on today's Uznadze Street in the 1870s, with a gold medal in 1901; the site later held the Kazbegi brewery, and Georgia Capital calls Kazbegi Georgia's oldest beer brand, brewed since 1881. In the Soviet years state breweries made standard lagers for the whole union. The Batumi brewery was begun in 1949 and brewed from 1951, built by Czech specialists, and in 2018 it still brewed a draught beer, Ludi Batumuri.

After independence the first big names appeared. Lomisi was founded in 1991 at Akhalgori by Tsezar Chocheli with relatives and friends and named after the local holiday Lomisoba. Castel Sakartvelo, a brewery and soft-drink plant at Lilo near Tbilisi, began in 1997 with an investment of 37 million dollars; bought by Jean-Paul Lanfranchi and Citigroup in January 2006, it held 14 percent of the market that year. Beer sales grew 16 percent a year in 2002-2007, to only 19 litres a head. In February 2008 Efes Breweries International bought all of Lomisi, the market leader with 42 percent by volume, and in May 2008 it announced a partnership with JSC Kazbegi, the second brewer with 39 percent.

Castel became Castel Georgia in 2012 and, by one French company history, Argo in 2018, owned by the wine traders Giorgi and Vasili Sulkhanishvili; Royal Swinkels, which licensed Bavaria in 2016 and Holland in 2017, bought 40 percent of Argo on 31 July 2019. Chocheli set up the Georgian Beer Company in 2011 for the Zedazeni beer; it now belongs to the Daily supermarket group. Global Beer Georgia, of the wine company Teliani Valley, took an EBRD-led loan of 18.5 million euros and built a brewery at Tsilkani, at work since 2017 on Heineken, Amstel and Krusovice under licence. Georgia Capital bought the craft brewer Genuine Brewing (Black Lion, Shavi Lomi) in 2018 and the Kazbegi brand with its commercial assets for 3.65 million dollars in March 2019.

Craft brewing is recent: Investor.ge counted practically no microbreweries in 2016 and at least ten by 2019, among them Number 8, Megobrebi, Underground, Naturale and Seahorse, some brewing in qvevri. On 28 October 2024 Georgia Capital agreed to sell its beer business, with Kazbegi and Black Lion, to Royal Swinkels for at least 63 million dollars, 80 percent to the Dutch group; Investor.ge in August 2026 lists Global Beer Georgia as 80 percent Swinkels. Four companies, Efes (Natakhtari, Karva, Kasris), the Georgian Beer Company (Zedazeni), Global Beer Georgia (Kazbegi) and Argo, are thought to hold about 85 percent of the market. In April 2026 the old Kazbegi site on Uznadze Street was bought by the developer Next. In 2025 Georgia drank a record 141 million litres of beer, 44 litres a head, 16 percent of it imported, while local output fell to 114 million litres, a second year of decline.