How Brewing Works

The stages of brewing, from cauldron to cup.

Overview & Equipment

Brewing on Parus (powered by BreweryX) turns ordinary ingredients into beers, wines, spirits and more. It looks involved at first, but it is really just a short process — and once it clicks, it is simple.

A drink moves through up to four steps. Each step is an action you carry out with a particular tool — and not every drink uses every step:

Step What you do Tool you use
1. Ferment Boil your ingredients in water Cauldron + heat source
2. Distill Purify spirits (spirits only) Brewing stand + blaze powder
3. Age Mature the brew in wood Built wooden barrel
4. Drink Enjoy it — and feel the effects —

Beers, wines and meads skip distilling. Some quick drinks barely age at all. Spirits use the lot.

One fermentation makes a batch of 3 bottles — a full cauldron always fills three, no matter how many ingredients you add. The recipe amounts are for the whole batch, so you do not need to scale anything up.

The closer you follow a recipe — exact fermenting time, distill runs, barrel wood and aging time — the higher the quality of the result. Every finished drink is even stamped "Brewed by ".

What you will need

Each step has its own page in this chapter. New to brewing? Start with Fermenting, then read the Worked Example — Golden Rum to see all four steps in action.

Fermenting

The first step in every brew is fermenting your ingredients. The tool you do it in is a cauldron of water over a heat source — think of the cauldron as your cooking pot, and fermenting as what happens inside it.

Setting up the cauldron

  1. Place a cauldron and fill it with water.
  2. Put a heat source directly underneath — a fire, campfire, lava, or magma block. The water starts to boil.

Fermenting

The longer it boils, the more it ferments — and the finished bottle's description will literally say how many minutes it fermented for.

Bottling

When the time is right, right-click the cauldron with empty glass bottles to fill them with the base brew.

Each fermentation makes a batch of 3 bottles — a full cauldron fills three and then empties, regardless of how many ingredients you added. The recipe's ingredient amounts are for the whole batch of three, not per bottle, so there is no need to multiply anything.

Timing matters: bottle too early or leave it boiling too long and the quality drops. Simple drinks like beer just need aging after this — spirits still need distilling.

Distilling

Some drinks need a second step: distilling. The tool is an ordinary brewing stand — the same one you use for potions. Spirits — whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, absinthe and the like — must be distilled. Beers, wines and meads do not; distilling those would ruin them.

How to distill

  1. Place your fermented base-brew bottles into a brewing stand.
  2. Fuel it with blaze powder, just like making potions.
  3. The stand distills the brew. Each recipe needs a specific number of distill runs — keep distilling until you have hit that number.

The brewing stand processes all three bottle slots at once, so you can distill up to three brews together.

Too few or too many runs lowers the quality. Each recipe page in Recipe Types lists how many runs it wants.

Aging

After fermenting (and distilling, for spirits), most good drinks need time to age. The tool is a wooden barrel — and on the server you must build a proper barrel for this; a plain vanilla Minecraft barrel block will not age brews.

There are two kinds of built barrel. Both are made of wood and registered with a sign — the only real difference is size.

Small and large Brewery barrels

Small barrel

A compact built barrel — still a real structure, just much smaller than the large one.

Large barrel

A big walk-up barrel structure for serious aging.

When a barrel is registered you will get a confirmation message in chat. Open it, place your brew inside, close it, and come back later for the aged result.

Wood & time

Aging happens while you are away and when chunks are not loaded.

Wood types

Every barrel is built from a type of wood, and each recipe calls for a specific one (Any means it does not matter). When you read a drink's Recipe config block, the wood: field is a number — here is the key:

# Wood # Wood
0 Any 7 Crimson
1 Birch 8 Warped
2 Oak 9 Mangrove
3 Jungle 10 Cherry
4 Spruce 11 Bamboo
5 Acacia 12 Cut Copper
6 Dark Oak 13 Pale Oak

A recipe with no wood/age at all (or age: 0) needs no barrel — bottle it and drink it straight after fermenting/distilling.

Quality & Sealing

Quality

Finished drinks come out bad, normal, or good (shown as a star rating). Quality depends on how precisely you matched the recipe at every step:

Each recipe also has a difficulty — high-difficulty drinks like absinthe or whiskey demand tight precision, while a simple beer is forgiving.

A finished brew label shows its name, quality stars, an alcohol indicator, and "Brewed by " — so a perfectly-aged spirit always carries the name of whoever made it.

Sealing

Sealing locks a brew in its current state. It is the tool for shops, trades and gifts — a sealed brew:

The Brew Sealing Table

Sealing is done at a Brew Sealing Table — a block you craft yourself. It is its own separate item, not a normal smoker, so your ordinary smokers keep working for cooking as usual.

Craft it with 2 glass bottles over 4 wood planks (any wood):

Bottle  Bottle
Plank   Plank
Plank   Plank

Place it down and right-click it to open the sealer, then drop your brews in — they come out sealed.

Only seal a brew once you are happy with it — sealing is permanent and stops it aging any further.

Drinking & Getting Drunk

Brewing is only half the fun — drinking has real effects.

Getting drunk

Alcoholic brews raise your drunkenness, and stronger drinks raise it faster:

Effects

Many brews carry potion effects, good or bad — coffee gives a speed boost, fire whiskey warms you, and absinthe is genuinely poisonous. Check a recipe before downing a bottle.

Sobering up

It is all part of the roleplay — but pace yourself, especially before a big build or a dragon run.