Beer was first brewed in Tunisia under the French protectorate (1881-1956), and the story begins with ice. On 25 November 1889 a group of friends led by the Luxembourg-born engineer Joseph Baldauff founded the Société Frigorifique de Tunis, a limited partnership with an ice factory at 14 rue d'Espagne in Tunis; the plant moved to Bab Saâdoun in 1900-1901. On 3 June 1925 it became a joint-stock company, the Société Frigorifique et Brasserie de Tunis (SFBT), and added a brewery: a small malthouse worked from 1930 and a modern one was built in 1935 to treat Tunisian barley. The first Stella beer reached the tables in the spring of 1927, and in 1951 a study found the manufacture of ice and beer monopolised by SFBT, whose capital was French, Belgian and Luxembourgish.
In 1951 the company, then run by Robert Palomba, launched Celtia, a 5% pilsner-type lager brewed at Bab Saâdoun and, by one account, named after the director's wife. The company was Tunisified in April 1977; in 1979, when Palomba left, the Brasseries et Glacières Internationales (BGI, with 49%) and Mohamed (Hamadi) Bousbia, who came from the central bank, took it over. Castel bought BGI in January 1990, and SFBT was listed on the Tunis Bourse on 3 October 1990. Beer has been canned since 1986 at Bou Argoub and sold on draught since 1992; SFBT brewed 1 million hectolitres in 2002 and Celtia alone 1.4 million in 2011.
The monopoly ended with Heineken. On 20 December 2006 it announced the purchase of 49.99% of the Société de Production et de Distribution des Boissons, run by the hotelier Saïd Boujbel, to build a brewery at Grombalia in Cap Bon. The plant, of 200,000 hl a year and costing 53 million dinars, opened on 28 October 2008 as Sonobra (Société Nouvelle de Brasserie), brewing Golden Brau and, from 2009, Heineken; its Berber, launched on 27 February 2014, caused shortages, Amstel followed in April 2019. SFBT answered with licensed beers (Löwenbräu, 33 Export and, from 2009, Beck's) and the IPA Legend by Celtia (5 November 2019, five hops, 5%). In 2012 it dropped 'frigorifique' and 'brasserie' from its name and became the Société de Fabrication des Boissons de Tunisie, keeping the initials.
Craft brewing hardly exists. Besides the two industrial brewers, BeerAdvocate lists three German-style brewpubs in tourist towns, Golfbräu at Port El Kantaoui and Brauhaus Yasmine and Brasserie Le Berbère at Hammamet, entered in 2011; most of their beers are marked inactive. Advertising of alcohol is banned, public sale is restricted and the state taxes beer: the 2013 finance law, voted on 20 December 2012, took a 24 cl can of Celtia from 1.100 to 1.370 dinars. SFBT sold 117 million litres in 2008, and a Tunisian drank some 10-13 litres of beer a year.
SFBT is quoted on the Bourse, BGI of the Castel group is its main shareholder, and it holds about 85% of the beer market. In 2025 it sold 1.73 million hl of beer (+2.3%) on sales of 843 million dinars, with a net profit of 267.2 million (+6%); in the fourth quarter local beer sales were 487,032 hl and beer exports rose 85%. In the first half of 2026 beer earned 271.5 million dinars (+11%, 78.3 million litres) and the net profit was 185 million. A tax-evasion brigade visited SFBT on 26 May 2025, the company denounced a social media campaign against it on 1 September 2025, and on 19 May 2026 its director said the customs audit was settled by instalments while a tax audit went on. In July 2025 the board began talks to buy the oilseed crusher Carthage Grains, still unfinished in May 2026.
