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Food & drink · Beer

Santorini's craft beer scene: two breweries worth knowing

Wine dominates the conversation, understandably — but the island has a small, genuine craft beer scene worth a detour.

4 min read Food & drink

Wine is unquestionably Santorini's headline drink (see our Assyrtiko guide), but the island is also home to two real, established craft breweries — enough to make it, by some accounts, the closest thing the Cyclades has to a beer destination.

Santorini Brewing Company

The island's oldest craft brewery, operating since 2011. It's built a following partly around beers named and themed after Santorini's donkeys — a nod to the animals long used to carry goods and visitors up the steps below Fira (see our horseback riding and donkey rides guide for context on that tradition, including its more recent animal-welfare criticism).

Ftelos Brewery

A larger, more recently built facility in Karterados, run as a full visitor destination rather than just a production brewery — tours through the brewing process, tastings paired with food, an on-site restaurant, and the cooking classes covered in our cooking classes guide. Its more experimental small-batch beers (fruited sours, stouts flavoured with local ingredients) have picked up a strong reputation among visiting beer enthusiasts specifically, beyond its more mainstream core range.

Where to find craft beer beyond the breweries themselves

A number of restaurants and bars around the island now stock one or both breweries' beers alongside the standard wine list — worth asking for directly if you want a change from Assyrtiko without leaving the island's own producers.

Worth knowingBoth breweries offer tours and tastings similar in format to a winery visit (see our first winery visit guide) — a good alternative or addition to a wine-focused day if you want to try something else genuinely local.

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