Beer was brewed here long before Europeans came: the earliest written mention, from 1779, shows a San family around a pot of beer, and the archives hold recipes for sugar beer, honey beer and brews of maize meal, peas or omuama bark. Industrial brewing arrived with German South West Africa, formally established in 1884. Settlers first imported beer from Germany, which was dear and slow; in the early years a third of all business licences were for alcohol. The first local brewery was most probably the Swakopmunder Brauerei, set up in early 1900, and more followed in the "beer triangle" of Windhoek, Swakopmund and Omaruru. After South African troops invaded in 1914 many Germans left, and most of the small breweries did not survive.

In 1920 the German bankers Hermann Ohlthaver and Carl List took majority holdings in four struggling breweries in liquidation (Omaruru, Kronen in Swakopmund, Klein Windhoek and Felsenkeller in Windhoek) and merged them as South West Breweries; the main brewery stood in Tal Street, Windhoek, in the building that now holds The Brewers Market. South Africa ruled the territory under a League of Nations mandate and banned the sale of alcohol to Africans until 1969. The main rival from the 1920s was the Hansa Brewery in Swakopmund, formed in 1928 by the Heuschneider family, the source of Tafel Lager; South West Breweries bought it in 1967. South African Breweries took a stake and the licence for Hansa Pilsner in South Africa, and kept that trademark when the two parted. The company moved into a new Windhoek brewery in 1983 and began to brew by the Reinheitsgebot in 1986, to set itself apart from SAB.

Independence on 21 March 1990 turned South West Breweries into Namibia Breweries Limited (NBL) and Windhoek Lager into a national symbol; NBL listed on the Namibian Stock Exchange in 1996 with the Ohlthaver & List group as controlling shareholder. In 2003 Heineken and Diageo became its partners. The Hansa brewery in Swakopmund, with about 150 workers, was closed as a cost cut in 2005: announced in June, it was to shut at the end of October.

SABMiller, which had imported its Castle and Carling beers for two decades, began a US$33.3 million, 260,000-hectolitre brewery at Okahandja in 2013; it was opened on 15 July 2015 and now belongs to AB InBev as the Welwitschia Brewing Plant, which began brewing Lion Lager in October 2024. Craft brewing came late. Camelthorn Brewing Company in Windhoek, built by the engineer Jörg Finkeldey, held the first brewing licence issued in Namibia in a century and made Weissbier and Helles from 2009; it ran into debt in 2012 and NBL took it over in January 2014. The Roof of Africa hotel in Windhoek opened a microbrewery in early 2018, Namib Dunes Craft Brewery in Swakopmund celebrated its first birthday in September 2018, and NBL runs the Swakopmund Brewing Company at the Brewer & Butcher restaurant.

Heineken agreed in November 2021 to take control of Distell and Namibia Breweries; the South African Competition Tribunal approved it in March 2023 and the purchase was completed on 26 April 2023, when NBL's operations were folded into Heineken Beverages. NBL brews at Windhoek (technical capacity 3 million hectolitres in 2020), exports to South Africa and 13 other countries, and launched Windhoek Beer in Kenya in February 2025. For 2025 it reported net revenue up 4% to N$4.8 billion and operating profit up 42% to N$830 million, helped by making cider and wine locally.