Beer in Syria is very old and very small. The Ebla tablets, found in 1974 and dated to about 2500 BC, show that the city of Ebla made several kinds of beer, one of them named after the city itself. Later the country drank wine, a tradition from Hellenistic times kept by the Orthodox communities, and above all arak: in the WHO figures given in 2012, beer was 4% of the recorded alcohol, wine 30% and spirits 66%. Beer was sold mainly to tourists through the army's Military Social Establishment supermarkets and through mini-markets in city centres.
The earliest industrial brewery on record is Al-Sharq in Aleppo, founded in 1954 as the state-owned Al-Shark Company for Food Stuff Products; its pale lager had 3.7% alcohol. In 1977 the state added Barada in Damascus, named after the river: a 3.4% pale lager, the larger of the two, made by the Barada Beer Company under the General Organisation for Food Industries. Their low price and distinct taste let them compete with Lebanese and even foreign beer, though Barada was known for uneven bottling and a stale taste. For decades these two brands were the Syrian beer.
The war ended both. In 2011 production of Barada and Al-Sharq stopped. Al-Sharq shut as the fighting in Aleppo grew, and the Barada works outside Damascus was ravaged in 2012, the government blaming 'extremists' and the rebels the army. In October 2019 the director of the General Organisation for Food Industries called Barada completely destroyed and its site unsuited to industry, and proposed to lease parts of it and then turn it into a tourism project. For Al-Sharq in Aleppo, a company with beer and other plants, the Organisation reported approved feasibility studies for restoring the non-alcoholic and the alcoholic beer lines, the second with a loan, for the 2020 plan. No report of a restart was found.
New private brewers filled the gap in 2017. Afamia, named after the ancient city of Apamea, has a brewery at Adra on the eastern edge of Damascus that was ready in 2010; the war closed it before any beer was sold, and its owners restarted at the end of summer 2017, giving away bottles labelled 'Beer of Syria' in the bars of the Old City and then distributing them from Damascus to Homs and Tartus. Arados, a pilsner brewed at Safita in Tartus governorate, reached the bars in summer 2017: inside.beer (28 August 2017) reports about 16 million US dollars invested, mostly in Czech equipment and a capacity of 150,000 hectolitres a year; AFP (18 December 2017) names the owner Bassel Abbas, 37, who brought ingredients, packaging and expertise from the Czech Republic, whose embassy stayed open and whose goods were outside the sanctions. It sold at 435 Syrian pounds (80 US cents) a bottle against 600 for foreign beer.
Today Afamia is the best-known Syrian beer, with Arados, Almaza and Turkish brands also on sale. No new brewery and no relaunch of Barada or Al-Sharq has been reported since the fall of Assad in December 2024. The new government has not imposed a nationwide alcohol ban, but the EUAA reports that licences are hard to renew and that no new ones are issued. In March 2025 about 60 Damascus bars were shut for having no licence and reopened within a day after an outcry. On 16 March 2026 the Damascus governorate banned alcohol in restaurants and bars, leaving sealed take-away sales in the Christian districts of Bab Touma, Qassaa and Bab Sharqi; after protests it softened the order within days, with exceptions for hotels and tourist venues.
