Top 10 Breweries in Russia
Russia's craft beer scene developed rapidly from about 2012 to 2022, producing a generation of technically accomplished independents in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the regions that attracted genuine international attention. Many started after the 2014 currency collapse sent imported-beer prices soaring. The political and economic upheaval after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine then disrupted imports of hops, equipment and ingredients, cut off export markets, and pushed the big Western brewers out of the country altogether. What follows profiles the breweries that defined Russian craft at its peak, with the caveat that current operating status varies and is hard to verify from outside the country — and that travel to Russia is currently strongly discouraged by most Western governments.
1. Baltika Breweries, St. Petersburg
Baltika is Russia's largest and most widely exported beer brand, founded in Leningrad in 1990. The numbered range — Baltika No. 3 (classic pale lager), No. 7 (export), No. 9 (extra strong) — defines what the mass Russian market drinks. For years Baltika was the crown jewel of Carlsberg's business, but after Russia placed it under state "temporary management" in 2023, Carlsberg sold it in December 2024 to VG Invest, a company owned by two Baltika executives, for 34 billion rubles — a fraction of its pre-war value. Understanding Baltika is understanding the commercial context Russian craft operates against: a massive, efficient macro brewery with beers that are technically clean if stylistically unremarkable.
2. AF Brew, St. Petersburg
AF Brew is St. Petersburg's most internationally acclaimed craft brewery. It started in 2012 as a contract brewer and opened its own brewery in November 2016, building a reputation for technically excellent IPAs, sours and barrel-aged beers that earned high marks on platforms like RateBeer and Untappd. AF Brew was one of the first Russian craft breweries to export to European markets and to collaborate seriously with the global craft beer community.
3. Salden's, Tula
Salden's, based in Tula south of Moscow, brews an aggressively creative range — its Tomato Gose became internationally known, alongside sours with sea buckthorn and a line of imperial stouts and other high-gravity beers. Tula's position as an industrial city without St. Petersburg's craft beer infrastructure makes Salden's achievement particularly notable, and its taphouse in the city became a destination for Russian beer travellers.
4. Plan B Brewery, Yaroslavl
Plan B brewed its first beer in November 2013 in Yaroslavl, the historic Volga city northeast of Moscow. Its hop-forward ales found a national audience, showing that quality craft beer could come from beyond the two capitals.
5. Stamm Beer, Moscow region
Stamm Beer was founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Andrei Ivanov and became one of the best-known breweries of the Moscow scene, with American brewer Dan Madden among its early team at the brewery outside the city. Its range of IPAs and other modern styles made it a fixture of Moscow's fast-growing craft bars in the mid-2010s.
6. Zagovor, Moscow
Zagovor (Conspiracy) was started in 2014 by Alex Korobkov and a group of friends, who also ran the RULE Taproom in central Moscow. As Korobkov told reporters, when they began "there was almost nothing being brought from outside" — and Zagovor's IPAs and experimental ales, made with deliberate irreverence toward mainstream brewing, helped fill that gap as Moscow's craft bar scene grew from a handful of venues to dozens.
7. Bakunin, St. Petersburg
Bakunin, named for the 19th-century anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, opened in 2013 as a bar and bottle shop for imported beers before its founders — Alexander Romanenko, Yuri Mitin and Vladimir Naumkin — began brewing their own. Within three years Bakunin beer was reaching international markets, and its bold IPAs and stouts made it one of the city's signature names, with several bars in St. Petersburg.
8. Jaws Brewery, Zarechny (Sverdlovsk region)
Jaws is one of Russia's longest-running craft breweries, founded in 2008 in the town of Zarechny near Yekaterinburg and named after a big-wave surf break in Hawaii. Its surf-themed range — English and American pale ales, oatmeal stout and many seasonals — kick-started the craft scene in the Urals, and Jaws went on to open bars in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well.
9. Volkovskaya Brewery (Wolf's Brewery)
Volkovskaya became one of Russia's best-known craft brands, producing IPAs, pale ales and a Belgian-style witbier alongside lemonades, and building a network of bars, largely around St. Petersburg. It is no longer independent: since January 2022 the Moscow Brewing Company has owned 99% of it.
10. Victory Art Brew and the casualties
Not everything survived. Victory Art Brew, founded by American software engineer Doug Zent in Ivanteyevka just north of Moscow and known for beers like its Celebration Stout and My Fallen Angel IPA, was one of the pioneers of the Russian craft boom, but it is now listed as no longer in business. Its fate is a reminder that the scene described here is a snapshot of a remarkable decade rather than a current travel guide.
Explore on the map
Our interactive map does not currently include any Russian breweries — Russia is not one of the countries in our dataset — so the breweries above are not plotted. Open the map to explore the countries we do cover, including neighbouring Finland and Poland, whose own craft scenes developed in the same years.