Palm wine was the drink of the Congo basin long before any brewery. The Brazzaville geographer Alain Codou notes that it pre-dated colonisation, and that the French administration banned it, together with distilled spirits, from the late 1910s until independence; fines and prison did not stop the drinking, and in town it came to be seen as a form of resistance. Industrial beer arrived as an import. In the early 1950s the port of Pointe-Noire took in some 5,000 tonnes of beer a year, and the Primus brewery that had stood in Léopoldville since 1923 sent a further 5,000 to 10,000 hectolitres across Stanley Pool.

Brewing in Brazzaville itself began in the 1950s. Brasco, today's market leader, counts 1952 as its birth year, and student theses on Bralima, the Léopoldville brewer, list a Brazzaville brewery in that year; Codou dates the first one, Brassibra, to 1956, with a capacity of 50,000 hl a year and still under the Primus brand. About ten years later Pointe-Noire was given a Kronenbourg brewery, the Société Congolaise des Brasseries Kronenbourg (S.C.B.K.), and the country drank more than 100,000 hl a year. Brazzaville grew from some 100,000 people at independence (15 August 1960) to 600,000 in 1984, and beer followed: about 750,000 hl in 1985, among the highest consumption in black Africa, with the brewers aiming at a million. Heineken stood behind Primus and the French group BSN behind Kronenbourg, and the Primus and Kronenbourg plants gave some 700 direct jobs. The lager Ngok followed in 1988.

The market leader is now Brasseries du Congo (Brasco), which describes itself as born of the merger of Heineken and CFAO in 1994 while also dating itself to 1952. For its 70th anniversary in 2022 Brasco counted four sites (breweries in Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, production centres in Dolisie and Oyo), a capacity of 2.5 million hl a year, 19 brands, 30,000 outlets and a turnover of about 50 billion CFA francs. Its beers are Primus, Ngok, Mutzig (the premium Mutzig Class since 2017, with a 17-day cold fermentation) and, since October 2023, Heineken brewed locally in returnable bottles after an investment of 2.2 billion CFA francs (€3.3 million).

A second brewer came in the 2010s. The Société des Brasseries et Limonaderies du Congo (Bralico) was founded in January 2012 by Jean-Paul Lanfranchi, a former adviser to Pierre Castel, and its plant at Vindoulou, Pointe-Noire, was inaugurated in November 2013 with the beers Nzoko, Black Nzoko, Sköl and Stärk and the soft drinks Mboka Cola and Suko. Castel's group BGI took it over in 2015 and launched Castel Beer in December 2015, followed by Doppel Münich and 33 Export in 2016 and Beaufort Lager in 2017; Stärk won Monde Sélection gold medals in 2016 and 2017. By 2023 Bralico had production lines at Pointe-Noire and Oyo, four sales agencies and 680 employees; EcoMatin puts the combined capacity at about 1.2 million bottles a day.

Today the market is a duopoly of the Heineken-led Brasco and the Castel-owned Bralico, and no craft brewery turned up in the sources. The recent news is hard for Brasco: on 15 October 2025 it announced a significant cut in staff, saying that its sales volumes had halved in ten years and that buying power was falling, while keeping its two production sites at Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville; at the end of 2023 it had about 800 direct jobs and 500 subcontractors. At Bralico the Portuguese manager Mario Russo has been general manager since 5 September 2025.