# 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 - **A cauldron** filled with **water**, over a **heat source** (fire, campfire, lava, or a magma block). - **Glass bottles** to scoop out the brew — a full cauldron yields **3 bottles** per batch. - **A brewing stand + blaze powder** — only for spirits that need distilling. - **A built barrel** of the right wood — a small (8 wood stairs) or large (a bigger wood structure) barrel, registered with a sign reading `Barrel`. Plain Minecraft barrel blocks do **not** age brews. - **A clock** (handy) — right-click the cauldron with one and it tells you how long it has been boiling. 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 - **Right-click the cauldron** with each ingredient to drop it in, in the amounts the recipe calls for. - Let it **boil for the recipe's time**, measured in real minutes. Coloured particles rise while it works. - Check progress any time by **right-clicking the cauldron with a clock** — it tells you *"This cauldron has been boiling for X minutes."* 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](https://wiki.hellhold.com/uploads/images/gallery/2026-06/breweryx-barrels.png) ## Small barrel A compact built barrel — still a real structure, just much smaller than the large one. - **Build it from 8 wooden stairs** in a barrel shape (see the left of the image above). - Place a **sign** on it and write **`Barrel`** on any line to register it. - Holds **9 brews**. ## Large barrel A big walk-up barrel structure for serious aging. - **Build it from 16 wooden stairs, 18 wood planks and 5 fences** (the fences form the tap * legs; see the right of the image — it is roughly 4 blocks wide). - Place a **sign** on it and write **`Barrel`** on any line to register it. - Holds **27 brews**, and once registered you can open it by clicking **any** of its blocks. 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 - **Wood type matters.** Each recipe calls for a specific wood — oak, birch, spruce, dark oak, acacia, and so on — and you get it from the wood you **build the barrel out of**. The wrong wood changes the outcome, so build a barrel of each wood you brew with. - **Aging is measured in "years."** On this server, **one year is about 20 real minutes** or **one full in-game day**. So a recipe asking for "14 years" needs roughly **4 to 5 hours** in the barrel. > 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: - How long it **fermented** in the cauldron - Number of **distill runs** - Barrel **wood type** - **Years aged** 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: - Becomes **static** — it stops aging and will never change again, so a perfect brew stays perfect forever. - **Stacks** with other identical sealed brews, making it tidy to store and sell. - **Hides its exact alcohol %** (it still shows "Alcoholic", just not the number). ### 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: - Your screen **stumbles and wobbles** as you walk. - Your **chat gets slurred** — and so do private messages. - Drink too much and you will **throw up**, and the very drunk may be **unable to log back in** until they sober up. ## 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 - **Eat bread** or **drink milk** to bring your drunkenness down quickly. - Otherwise it wears off on its own over time, and heavy sessions leave a lingering **hangover**. > It is all part of the roleplay — but pace yourself, especially before a big build or a dragon run.