Region & History

Beer in Sri Lanka has a short history, and it begins in the tea hills. In 1881, a brewery began commercial operations in Nuwara Eliya, a cool spot in the highlands of what was then the colony of Ceylon. This would later become the Lion Brewery. According to the common account, it brewed mainly for British tea planters.

Ceylon remained a British colony until 1948, and the island has borne the name Sri Lanka since 1972. So when people speak of "colonial beer" here, they mean an operation that began for a small European clientele and only later grew into a mass market. At the time, the tea plantations determined where people and goods moved, and beer followed them.

The great upheaval came in the nineties. In 1996, the Danish Carlsberg Group took a 25 percent stake in the brewery, which has since been known as Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC. The domestic conglomerate Carson Cumberbatch is also a partner. Two years later, in 1998, a new plant was built at Biyagama near the capital Colombo, initially designed for 300,000 hectoliters a year and later expanded to 750,000 hectoliters.

Today, Lion Brewery is the island's largest brewer. Its Lion Lager is the everyday beer, while Lion Stout serves as the flagship for connoisseurs. There is no protected designation of origin for beer from Sri Lanka, and the stout style itself originates from the British Isles anyway. What's brewed here, then, isn't a national style but an imported craft with its own climate.