The first brewery known in Kazakhstan was begun in 1858 in the fort of Verny (now Almaty) by Vasily Kuznetsov, a first-guild merchant from Tyukalinsk in Russia, according to the company that still carries its name as Pervyi Pivzavod, the First Brewery. After 1917 the plant was nationalised, from 1930 it made kvass and soft drinks, and in 1963 it joined the Almaty beer and soft-drink association. The Soviet showpiece was the brewery of Karaganda, working since 1958 and for twenty years the largest in Kazakhstan; Yevgeny Yevtushenko praised its beer in a poem of 1977. Shymkent dates its brewery from 1976, and the Almaty drinks association Napitki, founded in 1965, is the root of today's Caspian Beverage Holding. Kazakhstan declared its independence on 16 December 1991, and in 1992 Brewery No. 1 became a separate producer of beer and soft drinks.

The foreign brewers came in the 1990s. The Turkish group Efes privatised and rebuilt the Karaganda brewery Kolos, its first investment outside Turkey: the company dates its arrival to 1997, BRAUWELT to 1996, and from 1998 the plant was modernised step by step. In Almaty Ak-Nar was founded in 1998 and brewed the first Derbes in 1999; in that year Heineken took 28 per cent of the new Dinal brewery, and raised it to 51 per cent in 2002. Baltic Beverages Holding (BBH) bought 76 per cent of the Irbis brewery in November 2002 and the newly built Ak-Nar, of 60 million litres a year, in May 2003. The merged plant took the name Derbes in 2006, joined the Carlsberg Group in 2008 and has been Carlsberg Kazakhstan since 2010. Napitki became Susyndar in May 1999 and Caspian Beverage Holding in 2006, and bought a brewery in Astana in 2007.

In 2008 Efes and Heineken combined their Kazakh breweries, Efes Karaganda and Dinal, into one company of 72 and 28 per cent with about 30 per cent of the market and a capacity of over 220 million litres; the deal closed at the end of October. Heineken sold its share to Efes in December 2012, when Efes was the leading brewer. Pervyi Pivzavod took its present name in 2004, stopped in 2007 because a ring road was routed over its site, and opened a new plant in the Almaty suburbs on 16 April 2013. The importer Line Group has brewed Line Brew since 2009, in the foothills at Kaskelen. Craft brewing is still small: Baza Brewery opened in September 2018 in an industrial zone of the Almaty region, sharing the infrastructure of its neighbour Pervyi Pivzavod, on an investment of half a million dollars.

Kazakh breweries made 611 million litres in 2023, 14.8 per cent less than in 2022. The Czech embassy counted about 100 breweries with over 30 million decalitres of capacity, of which ten leading companies make more than 90 per cent of the beer. Output rose 9.4 per cent to 523 million litres in January-September 2025, and almost two thirds of it came from Almaty and its region. Efes Kazakhstan opened a bottling line of 4 million dollars at its Almaty-region plant on 27 January 2026 and says it holds 46 per cent of the market; Carlsberg Kazakhstan, with one brewery of 3 million hectolitres in Almaty, will become the PepsiCo bottler in Kazakhstan in 2026. The Shymkent brewery changed hands on 13 May 2024, when the businessman Tursengali Alaguzov became its owner. In February 2026 output fell to 31.6 million litres, 27 per cent below the year before; the chairman of the brewers' union puts the share of Kazakh-brewed beer at about 80 per cent, against 94 per cent three years earlier.