A 1991 brewery on the Ksani, a 2005 brewery by the Aragvi.

Natakhtari is named after a village. Natakhtari lies in the Mtskheta municipality of Georgia’s Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, on the right bank of the Aragvi river about eight kilometres north of the old capital Mtskheta, English Wikipedia says. Its brewery is the home of a beer and a lemonade that share the village’s name.

The company behind them is older than the brand. Georgian Wikipedia and the company’s own history say that the joint-stock company Lomisi was formed in 1991 and began building a small brewery at Akhalgori, beside the Ksani river. In 2005 — in September, according to Georgian Wikipedia — Lomisi opened a new brewery at Natakhtari, built with investment from TBC Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The company says the site was chosen for its clean surroundings, its closeness to the capital, Tbilisi, and above all for its spring water, and that the new brewery soon became the leader of the Georgian beer market; that ranking is the company’s own claim. Dutch Wikipedia adds that brewing at the old Lomisi plant later stopped and that production moved entirely to Natakhtari.

Both halves of the name date from that opening. The company says Natakhtari beer “has been proudly produced in Georgia since 2005,” and that Natakhtari lemonade has been “sharing sparkling moments since 2005.” It says it has sold in export markets since 2006.

From Lomisi to EFES Georgia.

In 2008 the brewery changed hands. The company says Efes Breweries International (EBI), the international beer business of Turkey’s Anadolu Efes, became interested in the brewery and bought 100 per cent of the company; Georgian and Dutch Wikipedia give the same year. Russian Wikipedia, citing Sputnik Georgia in 2020, describes Natakhtari, the business of JSC Lomisi, as the country’s largest brewer and part of the Anadolu Efes group, and names Kazbegi, Castel Sakartvelo and Zedazeni as Georgia’s other large brewers.

Today the business trades as EFES Georgia, which describes itself as EBI’s representative company in Georgia and as the leader of the Georgian beer and lemonade market. Its website, reached at both natakhtari.ge and natakhtari.com, lists local beers including Natakhtari, Natakhtari Extra, Karva and Kasris; beers brewed under licence, such as Staropramen from 2017 and Löwenbräu from 2019; and imported brands. The company dates a Krones filling line to 2010 and Ziemann brewing equipment to 2011, and says it has run a biological wastewater-treatment plant since 2012 and switched fully to renewable energy in 2023.

The beer and the lemonade are the two faces of the brand. The beer is a lager, which the company describes as Georgian beer made from malt, hops and Natakhtari spring water. The lemonade is a range of flavoured carbonated soft drinks; the company sells it in flavours including pear, tarragon, cream and feijoa, and says it exports it to 23 countries. A range of mixed drinks is sold as Natakhtari Zigzag. The company sells the lemonade in bottles from half a litre to two litres, and the beer in sizes up to kegs. Russian Wikipedia, again citing Sputnik Georgia, put the range at 15 beers and eight lemonades in 2020, and Dutch Wikipedia lists Mtieli, Kaiser and Efes Pilsen among the brewery’s beers, with Miller brewed under licence.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from Poland, Russia, Georgia and Brazil: Tyskie, Lech, Okocim, Baltika, Natakhtari, Skol and Itubaína. Drink brands from these countries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry the town or brewery where they began to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a can, a label and a name, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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 drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A village name on beer and lemonade.

Natakhtari has also put its name on Georgian sport. Georgian Wikipedia, citing the company’s history page, says that from 2008 the brand became an official sponsor of the Georgian Football Federation and the Georgian Rugby Union, and Dutch Wikipedia adds the national basketball federation from 2010. Since 2010, Dutch Wikipedia says, citing a 2013 report by Georgia About, the brewery has organised a summer beer festival in Tbilisi each year. The company also runs the Natakhtari Fund, which it says helps young people without parental care to prepare for independent life, in partnership with the Georgian organisation Association Our Home.

The company makes much of its water. It calls Natakhtari spring water, which it says comes from the mountains of the region, “our biggest asset,” and says both the beer and the lemonade are made with it; those are the company’s own descriptions. The company also lists the standards it has adopted, among them ISO 9001 quality management from 2011, HACCP and ISO 22000 food-safety certification from 2013, and ISO 14001 environmental management from 2023, and says it aims to have its beer on the market within 35 to 45 days of brewing, to keep it fresh. Where the drinks are made is plain on the record: the brewery stands at Natakhtari, and the company says its products have been made in Georgia since 2005.

For a design guide, Natakhtari shows how a single place name can carry two very different drinks — a lager and a family of flavoured lemonades — from one brewery; compare it with A. Le Coq, the Estonian brewery from Tartu, and Almdudler, the Austrian herbal lemonade. For this guide we use a mountain green, a pear gold and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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