Until 1933 all the beer drunk in Siam came from abroad, and imports rose steeply in the 1920s. The aristocrat and ferry-boat owner Phraya Bhirom Bhakdi (Boonrawd Sreshthaputra, born 1872) was told by a German shopkeeper in Bangkok that brewing there depended on the water and the taxes. He asked the government for permission in 1930, went to Europe to learn brewing and to find a builder, and set up Boon Rawd Brewery Co., Ltd. on 4 August 1933. The first bottles, Singha with Golden Kite and Stupa, went on sale on 6 July 1934, and on 25 October 1939 the brewery received the royal Garuda warrant that still marks its bottles.
The 1950 Liquor Act kept the field small: beer could be made only in a factory of at least 1,000,000 litres a year or in a brewpub of at least 100,000 litres selling on the spot, and from 2000 a licensed brewer had to be a limited company with 10 million baht of capital. A second brewery, Bangkok Beer Co., Ltd. (Hanuman, Map and Krating), was built in 1961 and later became the Amarit Brewery, whose line leads to today's San Miguel plant. Boon Rawd's 1967 brewhouse on Samsen Road in Bangkok brewed until 2001 and is now the Singha Museum. In the 1990s Singha's lead was challenged: Chang Beer of Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi's group began production in March 1995 at Bang Ban in Ayutthaya (1994 in some sources), and Thai Asia Pacific Brewery, set up in 1993, began brewing Heineken at Nonthaburi in 1995, adding Tiger in 2004 and its own Cheers in 2005.
Boon Rawd, trying to win back the lead, launched a second lager, Leo, in June 1998. ThaiBev was formed on 29 October 2003 from 58 beer and spirit businesses, among them Chang; Carlsberg and Chang had set up a 50-50 venture in December 2000, and Carlsberg left it in 2005. ThaiBev added Archa in 2004 and Federbrau in 2008 (relaunched in 2017). San Miguel entered in June 2004 by buying the assets of the Thai Amarit Brewery for 3.9 billion baht, a brewery of about one million hectolitres a year at Pathum Thani, and launched Red Horse and Blue Ice that autumn.
Craft brewing came slowly because of the licence rules. Tawandang German Brewery, a beer hall with shows and its own brewhouse on Rama III Road in Bangkok, opened in 1999 as one of the first legal microbreweries, with beer for its own tables only; by 2019 it had three outlets. Full Moon Brewworks, born in Phuket in 2015, is counted among the very few authorised microbreweries in the country. Most small brands were brewed abroad and imported back. A ministerial regulation of 2022 relaxed the rules for brewpubs and small breweries; in May 2025 the Cabinet agreed that craft and draught beer in approved kegs could be sold nationwide, the Community Liquor Act followed in June 2025, and on 21 October 2025 the Cabinet told the Excise Department to amend the canned-beer rules that keep small brewers out.
The beer market was worth more than 200 billion baht (about 6 billion US dollars) in 2024. Boon Rawd, with Singha and Leo, had about 62-63% of it, Chang about 32%, Carabao about 5% and European imports about 1%; Leo alone had about 50%. Carabao Group, the energy-drink maker, put some 4 billion baht into a brewery at Chai Nat and in November 2023 put five beers on sale at once under the Carabao and Tawandang names. On 14 March 2026 Tawandang began a national draught rollout, starting in Pattaya, with a target of 2,000 draught points by the end of 2026.
