From a trading partnership to Türkiye’s private brewer.

Efes is the beer of Anadolu Efes, and Anadolu Efes is part of a family partnership. Turkish Wikipedia says the Anadolu Group was founded in 1950 by Kamil Yazıcı and İzzet Özilhan, who had met the year before, and that the group is still owned by their two families; English Wikipedia says the group became a holding company in 1969. Turkish Wikipedia dates the incorporation of the brewing company itself to February 1966 and names the same two men as its founders.

Beer followed three years later. The company says its first beer production started in 1969, with two facilities, under the brand name Efes Pilsen, and its annual reports place those two breweries in İstanbul and İzmir. In the decades that followed, the company says, it added a hops-processing facility, two malteries and two more breweries in Türkiye. English and Turkish Wikipedia both say Anadolu Efes has led the Turkish beer market since the 1980s.

The name is a place. Efes is the Turkish name for Ephesus, the ancient city on the Aegean coast south of İzmir, one of the two cities where the beer was first brewed. Internationally the flagship is often sold as Efes Pilsener; at home it has long been Efes Pilsen, and the company now uses Efes as the family name for a range that includes Efes Malt, Efes Light and Efes Özel Seri, Turkish Wikipedia says.

Cans, kegs and a basketball club.

The company tells its history through packaging and firsts. It says that in 1986 it formed Efes Pazarlama to handle sales and marketing in Türkiye and produced the country’s first canned beer, and that in 2005 it launched what it calls the world’s first keg-shaped beer package. English Wikipedia says the flagship’s logo, label and bottle were revised in April 2009, citing a company release of that month.

Its portfolio widened in Türkiye through licences and revivals. The company says it began brewing Miller Genuine Draft in İstanbul under licence in 2000 and signed a licence for Beck’s with Interbrew in 2002. In 1998 it acquired the assets of Toros Biracılık and its Marmara brand. Turkish Wikipedia says the company launched Bomonti in 2010, named after İstanbul’s historic Bomonti brewery, which made beer from 1890 until 1991.

The brand also became known through sport. English Wikipedia says the İstanbul basketball club now called Anadolu Efes was founded in 1976 as Efes Pilsen S.K., sponsored by the beer, and changed its name in 2011 after Turkey’s Tobacco and Alcohol Market Regulatory Authority banned alcohol advertising in sports organisations. Under its new name the club won the EuroLeague in 2020–21 and 2021–22.

One expansion was blocked. Turkish Wikipedia says that in August 2009 Anadolu Efes bought the recipe and rights to Tekel Birası from Mey İçki, and that in February 2010 the Council of State, Turkey’s highest administrative court, halted the sale on the grounds that it would further strengthen the company’s dominant position, CNN Türk reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all beer names from Asia and Europe: San Miguel, Efes, Sapporo, Orion, Cass, Hite and Staropramen. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from breweries that still carry the name of a town or a founder to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a stadium bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packaged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From two Turkish breweries to Kazakhstan, Russia and Moldova.

From the 1990s the company went abroad. It says it entered Kazakhstan in 1996 by buying the Karagandi brewery in a privatisation, set up Efes Breweries International in 1998, opened a new brewery in Moscow in 1999, entered Moldova in 2003 and Georgia in 2008. In 2000, it says, four listed beer and malt companies were merged into Anadolu Efes.

Its partners have changed with the global brewing industry. The company says it signed a strategic alliance with SABMiller in 2011 and took over SABMiller’s beer operations in Russia and Ukraine in 2012; when AB InBev bought SABMiller in 2016, AB InBev became a shareholder. The two later combined their Russian and Ukrainian beer businesses as AB InBev Efes. After AB InBev decided in 2022 to leave Russia, the companies announced in October 2024 that they would separate the venture, with Anadolu Efes keeping the Russian business and AB InBev taking Ukraine, the trade publication Drinks Intel reported. Anadolu Efes is listed on Borsa İstanbul, and the Anadolu Group is its largest shareholder, according to the company’s shareholder page as archived in 2020.

Efes Pilsen is brewed in Türkiye at the company’s own breweries; abroad, English Wikipedia says, Anadolu Efes operates breweries in Kazakhstan, Russia, Moldova and Georgia, and the company says Efes Pilsener has been brewed under contract in Germany since 2010. English Wikipedia notes that Anadolu Efes is also the largest local shareholder in Coca-Cola İçecek, the Coca-Cola bottler in Türkiye. For more on the lettering, see our note on the font Efes uses.

For a design guide, Efes shows how a beer can borrow the name of an ancient city and carry it, with a navy and blue identity, from two Turkish breweries to markets across Europe and Central Asia. Compare Beck’s, the German lager Anadolu Efes has brewed under licence in Türkiye, and Ülker, another İstanbul family group with an international reach. For this guide we use navy, Aegean blue and silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Efes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.