Beer in Iran is among the oldest in the world. In 1992 Rudolph Michel, Patrick McGovern and Virginia Badler reported in Nature a residue of calcium oxalate, the beerstone, inside a grooved Late Uruk jar from Godin Tepe in the Zagros mountains of western Iran, a site dug by a team of the Royal Ontario Museum. It dates from about 3500-3100 BC and counts as the earliest chemical evidence of beer anywhere. In later Persian culture the drink of feasts and poetry was wine, and the sources found say little about beer; Persian Wikipedia adds that under Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1896) beer was brought in from India and was dear.

The first Iranian breweries came in the early 20th century, and all the ones the sources name stood in Tehran. Hamshahri dates the Majidiyeh brewery, beside the Shazdeh garden in the north-east of the city, to 1909 and calls it the first in the country; Persian Wikipedia names Abdolmajid Ein-od-Dowleh as its founder. The company A.R.G.O. was founded in 1930 and sold Argo beer; its first plant stood below Ferdowsi Square on Koshk Street, today Taghavi Street. The Shams brewery was built in 1931 according to Hamshahri (in the 1930s in Persian Wikipedia), and its beer, counted among the products of the Armenian-owned factories, sold for about 16-18 rials a bottle, which made it easy to find. A law of 1953 ordered liquor plants out of the city, and Argo built a second plant at Mehrabad in the 1950s; the Ferdowsi plant went out of use in the late 1960s, says Hamshahri. The Financial Times wrote in 2001 that a very large brewery built at Karaj on the eve of 1979 never produced a drop, and that Shams, which had brewed the most popular beer in another plant, went bankrupt.

Since 1979 the production and sale of alcoholic drinks has been banned; only the recognised Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian communities may make them for their own use and rites. Beer lived on as non-alcoholic ma'al-sha'ir, next to the malt drink made from malt extract. Iran Malta, a joint-stock company founded in Tehran in 1966-67, went on as Behnoush Iran with the brand Delster; its shares have been on the Tehran Stock Exchange since 1999, and in 2012 it reported more than 750,000 units a day and a share of the market that it said never fell below 50 per cent. Its one large rival is Istak, on sale since 2004, whose group runs plants in Rasht (Arpanoosh), Sanandaj, Marivan and Salmanshahr. Sales of non-alcoholic beer grew at double-digit rates in 2008.

Old names came back on the far side of the ban. The Ferdowsi building of Argo stood empty for about forty years until the Pejman Foundation bought it in 2016; it opened in 2020 as the Argo Factory museum of contemporary art, won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Dezeen architecture project of the year in 2022, and in March 2025 still sold non-alcoholic beer in its cafe. Persian Wikipedia says the Argo brand was bought in 2020 by a company called Kasel Nush and relaunched as non-alcoholic craft beer, while Al-Monitor says only that the rights to the logo went to a local beverage company. The Shams name returned as a non-alcoholic malt drink as well, in 2001 according to Persian Wikipedia and in 2018 according to San Diego Beer News. It is often said that Argo is the oldest beer brand of Iran, but no source confirms it, and Hamshahri dates the Majidiyeh brewery to 1909.