# Madagascar

Country page of DA Caps, a collection of beer bottle caps. Web page: https://dacaps.imcoll.com/country/mg/info

- Official name: Republic of Madagascar
- Local name: Repoblikan'i Madagasikara
- Caps in the collection: 10 (https://dacaps.imcoll.com/country_caps/131)
- Brands: 8

## Beer in Madagascar

Madagascar's older drinks are not beer. At funerals, circumcisions and exhumations Malagasy have long shared betsa-betsa, a fermented sugar-cane wine, toaka gasy, a home-distilled cane rum, and trembo, a fermented palm wine; a study in ten regions (Ethnobiology Letters, 2024) counted 75 plant species used to make and flavour them. Factory beer came with the French.

The first brewery in the records is at Antsirabe, in the highlands south of Antananarivo: on 17 July 1947 the district chief allowed the Société Rochefortaise d'Antsirabe to set up a brewery beside its factory on the Betafo road (Journal officiel de Madagascar, April and July 1947). In 1953 the same French group founded the Société tananarivienne de réfrigération et de boissons gazeuses, STAR, to bottle Coca-Cola in Antananarivo; it put a plant in Diego-Suarez (Antsiranana) in 1956. In 1957 a brewer was hired who tried 17 recipes on local ingredients, and the pilsener he chose was brewed at Antsirabe from 1958 as Three Horses Beer, THB, under a label copied from a Dutch brand with three horses. A Diego-Suarez brewery opened on 24 June 1968, a new Antsirabe brewery followed in 1976, and Malto, the company that gets highland farmers to grow malting barley, dates from the same decade.

The state came in under the Democratic Republic: in December 1977 the French owners agreed to give the Malagasy government 67% of STAR, renamed Brasseries STAR Madagascar in 1980. It made 280,000 hl of beer in 1979; in 1981 the plants ran at 56% of capacity for lack of imported raw materials, and a fourth brewery, at Tuléar (Toliara), was inaugurated on 23 June 1983. Privatised in 1989, STAR was bought by the Castel group in 2011, with the state keeping a minority share.

The first rival came late. From 2000 Unibra of Belgium (owner of the Skol brand for Africa), Phoenix Beverages of Mauritius and the French development lender Proparco (40%, 40%, 20%) planned the Nouvelle Brasserie de Madagascar; its 18-million-euro brewery at Ambatolampy was begun in 2007 and ready in April 2009, but the licence took another year and a half. Skol was on sale from 2010, with the abbey-style Libertalia, and in 2012 NBM held 8-9% of the market. In May 2014, with NBM close to bankruptcy, the state asked Star to buy it, which left Star the only brewer in the country.

Today Star runs five plants and 15 agencies, with more than 1,700 staff and about 18,000 contract farmers (2025). THB Pilsener, 5.4%, is the national beer; Queen's, Gold and the beer shandy Fresh complete the range. The old NBM plant at Mahazina was rebuilt for 23 million euros and inaugurated on 3 December 2021 as the Ambatolampy factory, 1.9 million hl a year of all drinks and over a third of Star's output. Madagascar brewed 1.36 million hl in 2022, 93rd in the world, at about 6 litres a head (L'Express, October 2025). On 1 September 2026 Malto marked its 50th year in Antsirabe with four new silos, raising storage from 6,000 to 14,000 tonnes. Craft beer is small and new: Red Island Brewing Co., started by expatriates from Britain, the USA and Australia, brewed IPAs, a baobab ale and a cacao porter near the Antananarivo airport in 2018; Apango, a rice beer by the Malagasy designer Ratia Rabemananoro, is brewed in Bordeaux and was launched in France in August 2020; and Namana Craft Beer, a micro brewery in Antananarivo run by a group of friends, makes golden, wheat and pale ales and an IPA, and was listed on BeerAdvocate in August 2026.

Sources:
- [Wikipedia: Three Horses Beer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Horses_Beer)
- [Entreprises coloniales: Brasseries STAR, Journal officiel notices and press 1947-2022](https://www.entreprises-coloniales.fr/madagascar-et-djibouti/Brasseries-STAR.pdf)
- [Star Madagascar: Notre histoire](https://www.star.mg/star/histoire/)
- [Star Madagascar: Plaquette institutionnelle (2025)](https://www.star.mg/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/STA_PLAQUETTE_INSTIT_2025_LEGAL.pdf)
- [Mada Magazine: THB, the beer of Madagascar](https://www.madamagazine.com/en/?p=8000)
- [Newsmada: Laurent Guiquerro on the THB recipe (9 May 2025)](https://newsmada.com/?p=131660)
- [L'Express de Madagascar: Production de bière (October 2025)](https://www.lexpress.mg/2025/10/production-de-biere-madagascar-distance.html)
- [L'Express de Madagascar: Ambatolampy, la Star se dote d'une nouvelle usine (4 December 2021)](https://lexpress.mg/04/12/2021/ambatolampy-la-star-se-dote-dune-nouvelle-usine/)
- [Newsmada: Usine Star d'Ambatolampy, la Sadc salue l'excellence industrielle (2025)](https://newsmada.com/?p=143224)
- [Newsmada: Malto, 50 ans au service de la filière orge (2 September 2026)](https://newsmada.com/?p=193790)
- [Skol Africa: Our story](https://www.skolafrica.com/?p=4316)
- [Untappd: Libertalia, Nouvelle Brasserie de Madagascar](https://untappd.com/b/nouvelle-brasserie-de-madagascar-libertalia/411254)
- [L'Express de Madagascar: Apango, une bière artisanale (5 August 2020)](https://lexpress.mg/05/08/2020/apango-une-biere-artisanale-lancee-en-france-fabriquee-par-un-malgache/)
- [#1 Hostel Antananarivo: Craft Beer in Mada (2018)](https://web.archive.org/web/2019/http://madagascarunderground.com/blog/2018/10/13/craft-beer-mada/)
- [Namana Craft Beer: official site](https://namana.mg)
- [BeerAdvocate: Breweries in Madagascar](https://www.beeradvocate.com/place/list/?c_id=MG&s_id=0&brewery=Y)
- [Ethnobiology Letters: Plant Species for the Manufacture of Malagasy Traditional Alcoholic Beverages (2024)](https://ojs.ethnobiology.org/index.php/ebl/article/view/1874)
- [Archontology: Madagascar, Polity Style 1958-2026](https://archontology.org/nations/madagascar/01_polity.php)
- [Wikipedia: Flag of Madagascar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Madagascar)
- [Wikipedia: Kingdom of Madagascar (Imerina)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Madagascar)

## Breweries (2)

- [Nouvelle Brasserie de Madagascar](https://dacaps.imcoll.com/brewery/1907.md) — 2 caps, 2010–
- [Brasseries Star Madagascar S.A.](https://dacaps.imcoll.com/brewery/1083.md) — 8 caps, 1953–