Craft Beer and Local Breweries in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Cambodia's default beer is a very cold mass-market lager — Angkor and Cambodia are the two names you will see most — poured for well under a dollar during Pub Street's seemingly endless happy hours. The alternative is small but real. Siem Reap Brewpub, on Street 05 near Kandal Village, brews on site and pours a house blonde, a dark ale and a honey ale in a converted two-storey villa with a courtyard, and it set the template that a handful of garden bars around Wat Damnak have followed since.
Where to drink it
Siem Reap Brewpub is the obvious start: a few minutes' walk from Psar Chas, with tasting flights and food a clear cut above bar standard. The Wat Damnak side of the river, around Street 06 and Street 26, holds the garden bars — Botanico is the long-running one, an open courtyard under trees with a rotating regional and imported list. Pub Street itself is not the place for this; it runs on cheap draught and volume, and does that well. For range rather than brewing, several bottle shops and hotel bars near the river stock Cambodian craft alongside Belgian and Thai imports at hotel prices.
How to approach it
Cambodia's craft scene is centred on Phnom Penh, so what reaches Siem Reap is one local brewhouse plus bottles trucked north — Kingdom Breweries and Riel Brewing are the names to look for. Ask what is freshest rather than ordering by style: turnover matters in this climate, and a lager or wheat beer usually beats a heavy stout at 33°C anyway. Expect a craft pint to cost several times a Pub Street draught, and happy hours in the villa bars to run through the late afternoon. Nearly everything worth trying sits within a fifteen-minute walk of the Old Market, so an evening on foot works well.