Beer came to Central Asia with European influence in the 19th century. The Tashkent merchant Nikolai Ivanov is recorded as the first person in the city to set up beer production, in 1874. The Samarkand brewery is dated by its owners to 1885: Pulsar Group Brewery says it was built then with the money of the entrepreneur Otto Vogau and Czech technology, and a travel-company history adds that it was called Samarkand Brewery No. 1 from 1925. It is often said that this was the first brewery in Central Asia, but no independent source confirms 1885, and Ivanov's date in Tashkent is earlier.

Uzbekistan declared independence from the USSR on 31 August 1991. The Samarkand plant became a joint-stock company with Czech participation in 1995 and is today Pulsar Group Brewery. In Tashkent, Mehnat Pivo separated from the agro-firm Mehnat's wine, mineral-water and juice business in January 2004, and in February 2005 the EBRD pledged it EUR 2.8 million to double its capacity to 50,000 hl a month. An official survey of August 2007 named the large brewers: the Uzbek-American Inter-Rohat (Kibray beer), Mehnat-Pivo (Patriot), the Uzbek-Czech Samarkand-Praga-Pivo (Pulsar), Raupxon, Almalykpivo and the Uzbek-German Ziyobakhsh Uni Trading (Asia beer, Bukhara). Five of the six had a capacity of 875,900 hl and used 54 percent of it; official output was 119.43 million litres in 2008.

In June 2006 Baltic Beverages Holding, then owned equally by Carlsberg and Scottish & Newcastle, announced a Tashkent brewery with the local partner Sarbast Plus (BBH 75.1 percent, EUR 50 million). The plant, of 1 million hl a year, shipped its first beer, Sarbast ('free, independent' in Uzbek), in July 2007 and was opened officially in September. Carlsberg took over BBH's assets in 2008, the venture became UzCarlsberg in October 2008, and the partner was bought out in June 2009; output rose 56 percent in January-September 2009 to 60.3 million litres. In January 2008 Heineken and Efes Breweries International formed a joint venture to buy Uzbek breweries, with Pulsar and Inter-Rohat reportedly named as targets; no source says a purchase was made. In March 2012 UzCarlsberg ran out of raw materials and stopped, with staff on leave until September, and in February 2017 Brauwelt reported that Carlsberg's Uzbek business had gone to Israel's Central Bottling Company.

The largest new brewery is Zomin Brewery in the Zomin (Zaamin) district of the Jizzakh region, built by the wine and spirits company Toshkentvino. Its Ziemann Holvrieka brewhouse was commissioned on 15 December 2018 and Zomin Pilsner was presented on 27 December; capacity is 280,000 hl a year of German-style all-malt beer. In Tashkent the Craft Brewing Company, founded in April 2018, calls itself the first craft brewery in the country. In October 2025 the Czech embassy reported that the government wanted a mini-brewery in every region: Czech Brewmasters had supplied one to a restaurant in Samarkand in 2022 and another, backed by the National Bank of Uzbekistan, to the Ikrom Brewery restaurant there.

The law on restricting the distribution and consumption of alcohol and tobacco came into force on 26 August 2023: sellers must ask a customer who looks under 21 for proof of age and refuse the sale without it (the limit had been 20). On 29 April 2026 Anadolu Efes announced a toll-filling agreement to brew its main beers in Tashkent at a partner's brewery, through a new company, Efes Tashkent FE LLC, with sales planned from the second quarter of 2026; the partner is not named.