The Gambia is about 90 percent Muslim and alcohol, though legal, is off limits to Muslims, so beer has leaned on tourists. The old drink of the country is palm wine, tapped from the oil palm mainly by the Jola and the Manjago, who call it bunukabu and pour it for their ancestors and at namings, weddings and burials. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s Bathurst, now Banjul, was its trading centre: tappers brought calabashes from the Kombo district to the junction of Albion Place and Lovell Street, where Jola and Manjago women bought it to sell by the litre. Britain held the colony from 1821 until independence on 18 February 1965, and the country's only industrial brewery began production in 1977.
Banjul Breweries Ltd was incorporated in 1973 and began building its plant in 1975 at the Kanifing Industrial Estate, near Westfield Junction. The main shareholders were the Hamburg firms DAH and Brauhaase International Management, with a minority held by the government. Brauhaase built the works, a German master brewer worked out the recipe, a light all-malt lager, and the first Julbrew was bottled in September 1977. Julbrew Export, darker and stronger, was sold beside it, and the plant bottled Guinness under licence and soft drinks such as Vimto and Malta. Julbrew won Monde Selection gold in 1979, 1987, 1990 and 1999. Part of the brewery burnt down in a coup in the 1980s and the coup of 1994 set it back again; by 2000 it brewed close to 50,000 hectolitres and belonged 61 percent to Brauhaase, 35 percent to a Danish brewery group, 3 percent to the state and 1 percent to the staff.
In 2008 the French Castel group bought the German and Danish stakes; the Germans were selling three breweries at once, the others in Cameroon and Nigeria. Castel kept the Julbrew recipe and the Guinness licence and added its own brands: Youki soft drinks in March 2009 and Castel Beer in May 2011. In 2018 the brewery made its first profit in ten years. Then, from 1 January 2019, parliament raised the excise on alcohol from 10 to 75 percent without consulting the company: a crate cost wholesalers 59 percent more overnight, beer sales were down 40 percent by June and 18 of about 200 workers were laid off. On 29 July 2019 the National Assembly cut the rate to 35 percent for local and 40 percent for imported beer.
The cut did not save the plant. At the end of March 2020 Castel announced that production would stop; the last brew, on 26 March, was a Guinness. Between 150 and 200 direct jobs were lost; the redundancy plan signed at the end of April covered over a year of wages. Officially the reason was poor profitability and the heavy investment the plant would need; the coronavirus collapse of tourism, the main buyer of Julbrew, came on top. In September 2020 the Information Minister said the government was working to rescue the company. Brewing Julbrew at Castel's Soboa brewery in Dakar and a sale to new investors were both discussed in the press.
No reopening and no other brewery, craft or industrial, is reported in the sources found. Beer is imported or smuggled in: in March 2024 the head of the Gambia Revenue Authority said that since Banjul Breweries closed some traders bring alcohol from Guinea-Bissau, many leaving the approved route to avoid duty, and in December 2022 the authority had arrested five people for smuggling alcohol from Guinea-Bissau through the Dimbaya border post. Palm wine remains the traditional drink; since August 2025 the National Centre for Arts and Culture has been preparing a UNESCO nomination of palm wine tapping.
