Beer came to the Korean peninsula with the Japanese in the 1930s, as German-style lagers. The first big breweries stood near Seoul, Chosun Breweries and Showa Kirin Breweries, both founded in 1933, and no source names a brewery in the north in those years. The preferred drink in North Korea is soju; beer comes second, with about 5 per cent of the alcohol drunk. Koryo Tours says that after the post-war rebuilding the Pyongyang Beer Factory made its first beer in 1956, which no second source confirms. Wikipedia writes that all beer in the country was home-made until at least 1960, that by the 1980s ordinary people could buy it, and that it was rationed: three bottles of beer and one of soju at each major public holiday until the mid-1990s.

Another old brewery is the Ponghak Foodstuffs Factory at Ponghak, just outside Pyongsong in South Pyongan Province. It was built round a natural spring in a small valley; construction began in 1978 and it has brewed for the public since 1982, besides bottling spring water, soft drinks and soju. Its pale lager comes as Ponghak 11 and Ponghak 12, the numbers being degrees Plato. Wikipedia names Ryongsong, Rakwon and Samgak among the other brands and counts at least ten major breweries, but lists none of them. Taedonggang is often taken for the only North Korean beer, yet Koryo Tours points out that it is one of the youngest brands.

Modern brewing began in 2000, when the state decided to build a showcase brewery and bought the plant of Ushers of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, England. Ushers, a brewery since 1824, stopped brewing that year; Wikipedia gives the price as GBP 1.5 million, paid through the German broker Uwe Oehms. The plant, about 40 large tanks with a capacity of half a million hectolitres a year, was taken down by a crew from Eastern Europe, shipped from Avonmouth and rebuilt in east Pyongyang as the Taedonggang Beer Factory, with German-made computer controls. It opened in April 2002. The sources differ on the build: Wikipedia has a groundbreaking on 15 January 2000, Koryo Tours says the brewery was established in 2001. Taedonggang is named after the Taedong River and is sold as numbered types, from 1 (all malt) to 5 (all rice), with 6 and 7 dark; a low-sugar light beer, the eighth variety, was reported in December 2023. The first television advert for it ran on 3 July 2009. A beer festival on the bank of the Taedong in August and September 2016 drew some 45,000 visitors; the one planned for 2017 was cancelled, possibly because of a drought. Taedonggang was exported to South Korea from 2005 to 2007, has been sold in China in small amounts since 2016, and in May 2019 four of its brewers went to the Mikkeller Beer Celebration in Copenhagen.

Beer is hard to move and to keep cold, so hotels and restaurants brew their own. The Rakwon Paradise Microbrewery is on the third floor of the Paradise Department Store in Pyongyang and serves one house beer, and makkoli, behind glass; the Yanggakdo Hotel has a microbrewery, the Koryo Hotel is known for a dark beer, and there is one at the Chongjin Tourist Hotel. Wikipedia describes a local steam beer, brewed with lager yeast at higher temperatures because power cuts made cold fermentation difficult. In late 2013 a microbrewery with Czech equipment, malt, hops and yeast opened in the Rason Special Economic Zone, and a Czech technologist stayed six months to teach two North Koreans (VOA, July 2014).

News of the last two years is about new halls and export. In December 2024 a two-storey beer hall run by the Taedonggang company was reported in the Hwasong district of Pyongyang. The brewery of the Rason Ryongson General Processing Factory, known for Tumangang beer, has teamed up with the Vladivostok firm Vostok-Energia, which filed an import declaration on 14 April 2025. In January 2026 Daily NK found Ponghak in import shops in Dandong, China, a box of twelve 500 ml bottles at 120 to 130 yuan.