Moldova has long been a wine country, and until the 20th century beer was a minor drink. A study of archival records by Dinu Poștarencu (Dialogica, 2023) counts seven breweries in Bessarabia in 1901 and eleven active ones by 1909, among them a new brewery in Bălți owned by Meer Brestecico, which the study follows until the enterprise passed to the state in 1940-1941. The Beermaster plant in Bălți dates itself from 1906 and says it was built by the German firm Topf. A group of brewery buildings from the end of the 19th century at Sfatul Țării 25 in Chișinău is on the state register of monuments (no. 233). It is often said that the Chișinău brewery now run by Efes was founded in 1873 and is the oldest in present-day Moldova, but no independent source confirms the year.

In the Moldavian SSR (1940-1991) beer came from a few state plants. The Chișinău one was the Fabrica de bere din Chișinău; the Bălți plant made Zhigulevskoe beer and lemonade and was rebuilt with new equipment in the mid-1990s. The Bender brewery in Druzhby street reports a tradition from 1860 and an archive mention in 1871; it was destroyed in the Second World War, rebuilt, and made 60,000 decalitres of beer in 1946. Until 1990 it brewed Zhigulevskoe and Kishinevskoe, and the Zhigulevskoe recipe is the base of its present Staraya Krepost beers.

After independence the Chișinău brewery was privatised in 1995 as the joint-stock company Vitanta-Intravest; by 2002 the Western NIS Enterprise Fund held 86% of it. In 2001 Vitanta had about 70% of a beer market of some 40 million litres, 9 litres a head. Efes Breweries International had its tender offer approved in 2002 and took control in January 2003 for about USD 12 million; the plant became Efes Vitanta Moldova Brewery, won ISO 9001 in 2004 and, since the SABMiller-Anadolu Efes alliance of 2012, also brews and sells SABMiller brands beside its own Chișinău, Efes Pilsener and Kozel. In 2002 the Bălți plant, then SA Arcașul, became the Moldovan-Czech Beermaster.

Consumption keeps growing: 128.7 million litres in 2025 against 105.3 million in 2019, about 61 litres per person aged 15 and over, with 70% brewed in Moldova. In 2021 the country made 87.9 million litres of malt beer, exported 2.8 million (946,000 litres to China, 388,000 to Romania) and imported 29.2 million, 15.18 million of them from Ukraine. In April 2026 Efes Moldova, with more than 360 staff and about USD 200 million invested since 2003, reported a new investment of over EUR 3 million: a Krones PET line (capacity up 15% to 12,000 bottles an hour), a keg line raised from 120 to 180 kegs an hour and a Swiss filter.

The craft scene is young. Kellers, set up in 1997, calls itself the first Moldovan microbrewery; in spring 2021 it relaunched as Keller Holz with Austrian investment, a new brewery in Budești (a five-vessel Caspary brewhouse, 10,000-20,000 hl a year) and a gastropub in central Chișinău. LaBREWtory was started in Chișinău in 2016 by an American couple with two local partners; Litra Brewing Company is a family microbrewery with a taproom in the city; Albeer, the first craft brewery in Cahul, marked its seventh anniversary in 2023; RockScor brews in Ghindești, and the Lumen Craft pub and brewery works at Chișinău airport. From 31 August to 4 September 2026 brewers from Efes Moldova, Unitanc, Albeer, Rivex and Litra toured Czech hop growers, equipment makers and breweries on a mission organised by the Czech embassy.