Beer is a recent arrival in Equatorial Guinea. Spain's claim to Bioko and the coast of the Gulf of Guinea goes back to the Treaty of El Pardo with Portugal in 1778; it took the island back in 1843-44 after a British anti-slavery base there (1827-43), and by the Treaty of Paris in 1900 it kept the mainland enclave of Río Muni. The old local drinks were topé, palm wine, and malamba, sugar-cane wine fermented for about two weeks. Under Spain the economy rested on cacao and coffee plantations on Fernando Po (Bioko); a planter from the Aragonese valley of Benasque remembered drinking Coronita, Carlsberg and Krönenburg beer in Santa Isabel, now Malabo. No brewery is recorded in the colony, and none was built after independence on 12 October 1968.

Beer came from outside. In November 2000 André Siaka, head of Brasseries du Cameroun, named Equatorial Guinea as one of only two countries his company exported to in volume, because it had no breweries; Cameroon and Gabon had long supplied the country with drinks. Castel, the French group, decided to build one. The foundation stone was laid in Bata on 14 November 2000 and the brewery was due to run by the end of 2001; the company says its first bottles were made in 2004. It was set up as the Sociedad Ecuatoguineana de Bebidas, Soeguibe, a subsidiary of Brasseries du Cameroun (SABC), and describes itself as the first agro-food industry in the country, built at the request of the authorities.

Soeguibe makes Castel Beer, the export lager 33 Export and the soft drink Top, with local lagers such as Asonga and La Guineana and a stout, King. For its first years it lost money. Jeune Afrique wrote in 2015 that Castel's business in the country had never taken off and had governance problems. On 31 May 2017 SABC separated from the subsidiary and the Gabonese Sobraga, another Castel company, took 55%; SABC's chief said the business had never made a profit, because the market was dominated by imports and shrinking with the fall in oil prices.

After 2017 it grew fast. It had under 5% of the market in 2017 and 80% by the end of 2024, when it made a record 70 million bottles of beer and soft drinks; its own site speaks of 88 million bottles a year, 250 staff and 10 brands. Beverage imports fell from 85.4 to 43.3 billion CFA francs between 2017 and 2024. The national statistics office counted 451,838 hectolitres of beer among 733,699 hectolitres of drinks made in 2024, and 27.3 billion CFA francs of beer sales. Soeguibe is the only brewery in the country: beer lists that show Beaufort as a second brewery are listing a Soeguibe brand, and no craft brewer was found.

On 26 February 2025 Soeguibe, led by director general Edouard Chevalier, presented Vice-President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue with a plan, worth about 10 billion CFA francs, to enlarge the Bata plant, build a second one at Luba on Bioko near Malabo to cut transport costs, and raise its brands from 10 to 15 by the end of 2025. No sign that the Luba plant has been started was found. In October 2026 the company announced Estrella Galicia, the Galician beer founded in 1906, as the newest brand in a portfolio that also holds Castel Beer, 33 Export, Beaufort and Guinness.